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THE AUTHOR AND HIS WIFE UPON THE TRAIL. 



In To 

The Yukon 



BY 

WILLIAM SEYMOUR EDWARDS 



WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS 



CINCINNATI 

The Robert Clarke Company 

1904 



^x^^ 



copyright, 1904, by 
William Seymour Edwards 



PUBLISHED >fOVEMBER, 1904 



f LIBRARY Of CONGfI^S 
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DEC 5 I9U4 

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Press of The Robert Clarke Company 
cincinnati, u. 8. a. 



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DEDICATION. 

TO THE COMRADE WHOSE CHARMING COMPANIONSHIP 

ADDED SO GREATLY TO THE DELIGHTS OF MY 

TWO months' OUTING, THIS LITTLE 

VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY 

DEDICATED, 

THE AUTHOR. 



Ill 



PREFACE. 

These letters were not written for publication originally. 
They were written for the home circle and the few friends 
who might care to read them. They are the brief narrative 
of daily journeyings and experiences during a very delight- 
ful two months of travel into the far north and along the 
Pacific slope of our continent. Some of the letters were 
afterwards published in the daily press. They are now put 
into this little book and a few of the Kodak snapshots taken 
are given in half-tone prints. 

We were greeted with much friendliness along the 
way and were the recipients of many courtesies. None 
showed us greater attention than the able and considerate 
officials of the Pacific Coast S. S. Co., the Alaska S. S. Co. 
and the White Pass and Yukon Railway Co., including 
Mr. Kekewich, managing Director of the London Board* 
and Mr. Newell, Vice-President of the Company. 

At Atlin and Dawson we met and made many friends, 
and we would here reiterate to them, one and all, our 
warm appreciation of their hospitalities. 

William Seymour Edwards. 
Charleston-Kanawha, West Virginia, 
August, 1904. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE. 

I. The Great Lakes. Cleveland to Detroit. . . 13 
II. St. Paul, Winnipeg and Banff; The Wheat 

Lands of the Far Northwest 20 

III. Banff to Vancouver Across the Rockies 

AND Selkirks 32 

IV. Vancouver and Skagway; Fjords and 

Forests 46 

V. Skagway, Caribou Crossing and Atlin 69 

VI. The Great Llewellen or Taku Glacier 103 

VII. Voyaging Down the Mighty Yukon 106 

VIII. Dawson and the Golden Klondike 126 

IX. Men of the Klondike 158 

X. Dog Lore of the North 168 

XI. How THE GO^TERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD... 183 

XII. Seattle, the Future Mistress of the Trade 

AND Commerce of the North 194 

XIII, The Valley of the Willamette 212 

XIV. San Francisco 218 

XV. Los Angeles 237 

XVI. San Francisco and Salt Lake City 248 

XVII. A Broncho-busting Match 270 

XVIII. Colorado AND Denver 288 

XIX. Across Nebraska 295 

XX. Along Iowa and into Missouri to St. Louis 302 

Vll 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE. 

The Author and His Wife Upon the Trail. .. .Frontispiece. 

The Waterside, Cleveland 15 

Entrance St. Clair Canal 15 

Down the Silver Bow— Banff 25 

A Reach of the Frazer River 35 

Big Douglas Fir — Vancouver Park 39 

Victoria, B. C— The Harbor 43 ' 

Leaving Vancouver 47 ^ 

Awaiting Cargo — Vancouver, B. C 51 ' 

Totem Poles at Ketchikan 55 "' 

Glaciers on Frederick Sound 57 

Approaching Fort Wrangel 61 

The Pier— Fort Wrangel 61 

The Pier — Skagway 65 

Lynn Canal from the Summit of White Pass 65 

Looking Down White Pass 67 

The Summit — ^White Pass 67 

The International Boundary 71 

Early September Snow, Caribou Crossing 73 

Caribou Crossing 73 

A Vista on Lake Marsh 77 

On the Trail at Caribou 79 ^ 

View Near Caribou Crossing 79 ^ 

The Taku River 83 

Lake Atlin 85 - 

Atlin Baggage Express 89 

ix 



PAGE. 

Atlin City Waterworks 89 

Government Mail Crossing Lake Atlin 93 

Miner's Cabin on Spruce Creek, Atlin Gold Diggings. 93 

Finding "Color," a Good Strike, Otter Creek, B. C... 97 

Sluicing for Gold, Otter Creek, B. C 97 

Alfred Sutton, an Atlin Gold Digger 99 

Bishop and Mrs. Bumpus 107 

Fishing for Grayling, White Horse Rapids Ill 

Moonlight on Lake Le Barge 113 

A Yukon Sunset 117 

The Upper Yukon 117 

A Yukon Coal Mine 119 

Five Finger Rapids on the Yukon 119 

Coming Up the Yukon 123 

The "Sarah" Arriving at Dawson, 1,600 Miles up from 

St. Michael's 127 

The Levee, Dawson — Our Steamer 127 

Dawson City, The Yukon — Looking Down 131 

Dawson and Mouth of Klondike River, Looking Up.. 131 

Second Avenue, Dawson 135 

Dawson — View Down the Yukon 135 

The Cecil — The First Hotel in Dawson 137 

A Private Carriage, Dawson 137 

Dog Corral — The Fastest Team in Dawson 141 

A Potato Patch at Dawson 141 

First Agricultural Fair Held at Dawson, September, 

1903 145 

Daily Stage on Bonanza 149 

Discovery Claim on Bonanza of the Klondike 149 

Looking Up the Klondike River 153 

X 



PAGE. 

"Mes Enfants," Malamute Pups 155 

A Klondike Cabin 155 

On the Yukon 163 

Floating Down the Yukon 163 

With and Without 169 

Malamute Team of Government Mail Carrier, Dawson 175 

Breaking of the Yukon— May 17, 1903 175 

Sun Dogs 177 

Winter Landscape 177 

Lake Bennett 185 

The Heighth of Land, White Pass 185 

Mt. Rainier or Tacoma 205 

Along the Columbia River 209 

A Big Redwood 223 

Italian Fishing Craft at Santa Cruz 227 

The Franciscan Garden — Santa Barbara 231 

The Sea — Santa Barbara (two views) 233 

Marengo Avenue, Pasadena 239 

Street View, Los Angeles 239 

The Sagebrush and Alkali Desert 251 

The Mormon Temple 255 

The Mormon Tithing House 259 

The Mormon "Lion House" 259 

Great Salt Lake 265 

Nuckolds Putting on the Hoodwink 273 

Nuckolds, "The Broncho Busted" 273 

Grimsby and the Judges 277 

Arizona Moore Up 281 

Arizona Moore 281 

The Crowd at the Broncho-Busting Match 285 

xl 



Page, 
On the Great Kanawha 313 

Our Kanawha Garden 315 

Map of Route in the U. S 317 

Map of Upper Yukon Basin 319 



xli 



In To The Yukon 



FIRST LETTER. 

THE GREAT LAKES, CLEVELAND TO DETROIT. 

Steamer Northwest, on Lake Superior, \ 

August 11, 1903. / 

We reached Cleveland just in time to catch the 
big liner, which cast off her cables almost as soon as 
we were aboard. A vessel of 5,000 tons, a regular sea 
ship. The boat was packed with well-dressed people, 
out for a vacation trip, most of them. By and by 
we began to pass islands, and about 2 p. m. turned 
into a broad channel between sedgy banks — the 
Detroit River. Many craft we passed and more 
overtook, for we were the fastest thing on the lakes 
as well as the biggest. 

Toward 3 p. m., the tall chimneys of the huge 
salt works and the church spires of the city of Detroit 
began to come into view. A superb water front, 
several miles long, and great warehouses and sub- 
stantial buildings of brick and stone, fit for a vast 
commerce. 

The sail up the Detroit River, through Lake St. 
Clair, and then up the St. Clair River to Lake Huron, 
was as lovely a water trip as any I have made. The 

13 



14 IN TO THE YUKON. 

superb park ''Belle Isle," the pride of Detroit; the 
many, very many, villas and cottages all along the 
water-side, hundreds of them; everywhere boats, 
skiffs, launches, naptha and steam, all filled with Sun- 
day pleasure excursionists, the many great pleasure 
excursion steamers loaded down with passengers, gave 
a life and liveliness to the water views that astonished 
and pleased us. 

The Lake St. Clair is about twenty miles across, 
apparently broader than it is, for the reason that its 
sedgy margins are so wide that the trees and higher 
land further back seem the real border of the lake. 
What is called the *'St. Clair Flats" are the wide, 
low-lying lands on each side of the long reaches of 
the St. Clair River. Twenty miles of cottages, hotels, 
club-houses, are strung along the water-side, each with 
its little pier and its boats. 

Towards dark — eight o'clock — we came to Semia 
and Port Huron, and pointed out into the great lake, 
second in depth to Superior — larger than any but 
Superior — a bit of geography I had quite forgotten. 

At dawn on Monday, we were skirting the high- 
wooded southern shore, and by 11 a. m. sighted the 
fir-clad heights of Mackinac where Lake Michi- 
gan comes in. Here is a beautiful protected bay, 
where is a big hotel, and the good people of Chicago 
come to forget the summer heats. After half an 
hour, we turned again and toward the north, in a 
half circle, and by 4 P. m. were amidst islands and 
in a narrow channel, the St. Mary's River. 




F.NTRANCE ST. CLAIR CANAL. 




THK WATEUSIDK, CLK\ KLAM). 



THE GREAT LAKES. 17 

Huron is a deep blue like Superior, and unlike the 
green of shallow Erie. The channel toward the Soo 
is very tortuous — many windings and sharp turns, 
marked by buoys and multitudinous beacon lights. 
All along we had passed great numbers of steamships 
and barges — ore carriers, but nowhere saw a large 
sailing craft, only a sail boat here and there. This 
entire extensive traffic is a steam traffic, and though 
we see many boats, they are black and sombre, and 
burdened with coal and ore. 

It was late, nearly seven o^clock, when we steamed 
slowly into the lock basin at the Soo. High fir-clad 
hills on either hand ; a multitude of channels among 
wooded islands. A new and vigorous manufacturing 
community growing, up on either shore where the 
electric power is being harnessed. Many build- 
ings, many new residences, some of them large and 
imposing, covering the sloping hillsides. The rapids 
are a mile or more in length and half a mile wide. 
The American canal with its locks is on the south 
side. One, the old lock, small; the other, large and 
deep for modern traffic. We were here delayed more 
than two hours by reason of the pack of boats ahead 
of us. It was dark when we came out of the lock — 
a lift of twenty-one feet. But meantime, the hills on 
either hand had burst out into hundreds of electric 
lights, betokening a much greater population than 
I had conceived. As we entered the American lock, 
a big black ship, almost as large as ours, crept in 
behind us to the Canadian lock on the river's further 



18 IN TO THE YUKON. 

side — one of the Canadian Pacific line going to Fort 
William. 

It was a full moon as we came out of the upper 
river and lost ourselves in the blackness of Lake 
Superior. A keen, crisp wind, a heavier swell than 
on the lakes bolow. We were continually passing 
innumerable craft with their dancing night lights. 
The tonnage that now goes through the Soo canals 
is greater than that of Suez. How little could the 
world have dreamed of this a few years ago! 

To-day when I came on deck we were just 
entering the ship canal that makes the short cut by 
way of Houghton. A cold mist and rain, fir-trees 
and birches, small and stunted, a cold land. A 
country smacking strongly of Norway. No wonder 
the Scandinavians and Finns take to a land so like 
their own. 

At Houghton we were in the center of the copper 
region. A vigorous town, many handsome resi- 
dences. But it has been cold all day. Mercury 56 
degrees this morning. A sharp wind from the north. 
The bulk of the passengers are summer tourists in 
thin gauze and light clothing, and all day they are 
shivering in the cabin under cover, while we stay 
warm out on deck. 

The food is excellent, and the famous planked 
white fish is our stand-by. 

This whole trip is a great surprise to me. The 
splendid great ship, the conveniences and luxury 
equalling any trans-Atlantic liner. The variety 



THE GREAT LAKES. 19 

and beauty of the scenery, the differences in the 
lakes, their magnitude, the islands, the tributary 
rivers with their great flow of clear water, the vast 
traffic of multitudinous big boats. The life and vigor 
and stir of this north country ! Many of the passen- 
gers are going to the Yellowstone. We will reach 
Duluth about 10 p. m., and leave by the 11 :10 Great 
Northern train for St. Paul. 



20 IN TO THE YUKON. 



SECOND LETTER. 

ST. PAUL, WINNIPEG AND BANFF; THE WHEAT LANDS 
OF THE PAR NORTHWEST. 

Winnipeg, August 14, 1903. 

We left St. Paul in the Winnipeg sleeper on the 
Great Northern Railroad at 8 :06 p. m. When we 
awoke this morning we were flying through the 
wheatfields of North Dakota, passing Grand Forks 
at about 9 a. m., and reaching Neche, on the 
Canadian border, at eleven, and arriving at Win- 
nipeg at 1 :40 p. M., a longer journey to the north — 
440 miles — than I had realized. It was my first sight 
of a prairie — that vast stretch of wheat country 
reaching 1,000 miles west of St. Paul, and as fat* 
to the north of it. In the States it was wheat as far 
as the eye could reach in all directions — ripening 
wheat, waving in the keen wind like a golden sea, 
or cut and stacked wheat in innumerable piles, in 
countless shocks. A few miles north of the boundary 
the wheat land gradually changed to meadow and 
grass land, with many red cattle. Vast hay stacks 
here and there — the country flat. 

Winnipeg holds about 60,000 people, they tell me. 
Wooden houses mostly, but some fine modern ones 
of stone and brick. Hundreds of new houses built 
and houses a-building. Fine electric tramway system, 



NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 21 

on which we have been riding all the afternoon. Many- 
paved streets, some wood-paved, but mostly the native 
black earth of all this northland. A vigorous, hust- 
ling town, with now a big boom on, owing to the 
rapid development of the far north wheat lands — 
''the Chicago of the far Northwest," they call it. 
We go on to-night by 6 p. m. train, and should reach 
Banff in two nights and a day. There we rest a day. 



Banff Springs Hotel, Banff, Canada, \ 

August 18, 1903. j 

We had intended leaving Winnipeg by the through 
train called the "Imperial Limited," which crosses 
the continent three times a week each way, but to 
do so we should have had to lie over in Winnipeg 
a full day and a half longer, and we had already 
seen the shell of the town in our first afternoon, so 
we mended our plans, paid our modest dinner bill 
of fifty cents each at the Clarendon Hotel, and took 
the ordinary daily through Pacific express which, 
leaving Winnipeg at 6 p. m., would yet bring us to 
Banff, even though it would take a half day longer in 
doing it, earlier than the Imperial Limited train. A 
good many people seemed to be of our mind, and so 
the railway people attached an extra sleeper to the al- 
ready crowded train. We were fixed in this. A 
sumptuous car, finished in curled maple and brass, 
longer, wider, hio'her than even the large cars run 
on the N. Y. C. & H. R. R., that traverse no tunnels. 
These Canadian Pacific Railway cars are built by the 



22 IN TO THE YUKON. 

railway company, owned and run by it. No ''Pull- 
man conductor;" the porter, be lie white or black, 
runs the car and handles the tickets and the cash. 

The company were mostly Canadians, going out 
to Eegina, Calgary, Edmonton, etc., large towns 
toward which Winnipeg bears the same relation as 
does Cincinnati to our country (West Virginia), and 
many Australians en route to take ship at Vancouver. 

For a long distance the track seemed to be per- 
fectly straight, and miles and miles west of Win- 
nipeg, the city still peeped far distant between 
the rails. We rose a little, too, just a little, but 
steadily, constantly. And on either hand and before 
and behind spread out the wonderful flatness of the 
earth. The real prairie now. Not even a tree, not a 
bush, not a hill, just as smooth as a floor, like an 
even sea, as far as the eye could reach and out beyond. 

A good deal of wheat grows west of Winnipeg, 
as well as south and north and east of it. We were 
still in wheat land when we awoke yesterday morn- 
ing, though the now intervening patches of green 
grass grew larger and larger until the grass covered 
and dominated everything. And then we had miles 
and miles of a more rolling country. Here and there 
began to appear pools of water, ponds, even small 
lakes and deep sunk streams bordered with rushes 
and scrub willow and stunted alders. 

Every bit of water was alive with wild fowl. Each 
pool we hurried by was seemingly packed with geese, 
brant and ducks. All the myriads of the north land 



NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 28 

water birds seemed to be here gathering and resting 
preparatory to their long flight to the distant south. 
Many plover, snipe and some herons and even cranes 
I noted along the margins of the pools and streams. 
And this prolific bird life cared but little for the 
presence of man. Our rushing train did not frighten 
them, none ever took to wing, too much engrossed 
were they in their own pursuits. 

Through the flat wheat land the farmsteads were 
few and far between, and the towns only at long 
intervals. Nor is there here the population seen 
among the many and thrifty towns and villages of 
Minnesota and Dakota. 

In the grass lands we saw no towns at all, nor 
made many stops, while herds of cattle began to in- 
crease in number ; of horses, also, as we drew further 
and further west and north. 

Toward evening, through the long twilight, we 
entered a hill country, where were a great many 
cattle and horses, and some Mexican cowboys round- 
ing up the stock ere nightfall. 

Here, also, the wilder life of the hills came close 
upon us. Just as we drew beyond the prairie a large 
grey wolf had crossed our way. He had no fear of 
the iron horse ; he stood and watched us with evident 
curiosity, lifting one forepaw as he gazed upon the 
flying train, not fifty feet away. When we were gone 
by, he turned and trotted leisurely into the bush. 

New buildings with added frequency met our 
view. Sometimes whole new towns. All this I after- 



24 IN TO THE YUKON. 

ward learned is largely owing to the present Amer- 
ican immigration. 

At dusk we stopped at the bustling town of 
Dunmore, just where the railway crosses the broad 
Assiniboia Eiver on a long bridge. Here many of 
our fellow sleepers left us, and several new passengers 
got into our car to ride through to Calgary, the larg- 
est town in the Northwest Territory — seven or eight 
thousand inhabitants — and where the Edmonton 
branch goes off two hundred miles into the north, and 
will soon go three or four hundred miles further 
through the opening wheat country which the world 
is now pouring into. 

This morning we were following the Silver Bow 
River, past a long lake which it widens into in the 
journey of its waters toward Hudson's Bay; then 
we were among fir-clad foot-hills, and then, quite 
suddenly, as the enveloping mist lifted, there were 
revealed upon either side of us the gigantic, bare, 
rocky, snow-capped masses of the real Rocky Moun- 
tain chain. I have never yet seen as immense and 
gigantic masses of bare rock, unless it be the Cordil- 
lera of Michoacan, in Mexico. 

Here we are at a fine modern hotel kept by the 
Canadian Pacific Railroad. It is cool, even cold, 
almost. As cold as on Lake Superior, 54 and 
56 degrees, and as in St. Paul the days we were 
there, but here the air is so much drier that one sits 
by the open window and does not feel the cold. 

Among the passengers on our train I fell in with 




DOWN THE SILVER BOW — BANFF 



NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 27 

several of those who now make their homes in this 
booming land — from Winnipeg west and north, all 
this vast country is now on what is called a boom — 
a wheat-land boom, a cattle boom, a town boom! 
One, a vigorous six-footer from Wisconsin, a drummer 
for an American harvesting machine, has put and is 
now putting all the money he can raise into the buy- 
ing of these northern wheat lands. And there is no 
finer wheat land in all the world, he said, than the 
rich, warm Peace River valley, four hundred or five 
hundred miles north of Edmonton. A Canadian 
drummer, who had won a medal fighting in South 
Africa, also told me much of the awakening up 
here. The Hudson Bay Company had for years kept 
secret the fatness of this north land, although 
they and their agents had (for more than a century) 
raised great wheat harvests on their own hidden- 
away farms along the distant Peace River, where 
their mills made it into flour for their own use, and 
to feed the fur-trapping Indians. But never a w^ord 
had they or their close-mouthed Scotch servants said 
about all the richness of which they so well knew. 
But little by little had the news of these wheat crops 
leaked out into the world beyond, and little by little, 
after the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway, 
and cession to Canada of their exclusive rights, had 
the pioneer settlers quietly crept into the hidden 
country. Now there were many farmers snugly liv- 
ing on their own lands along the Peace River valley 
and in that neighboring region. Every year there are 



28 IN TO THE YUKON. 

more of them. They haul their supplies three hun- 
dred miles north from Edmonton, or buy direct of 
the nearest Hudson Bay Post. Soon the railways will 
be up among them, soon the greatest export of Ca- 
nadian wheat will come from that now far-away 
country. And here is where the hustling American 
comes in. The Canadian has been slow to ''catch 
on." The dull farmer of Ontario has scoffed at 
the notion of good wheat land so far north. He 
preferred to stay at home and raise peas and barley. 
The French habitan, too, did not take stock in the 
tales of a land so far from church and kindred. 
Nor did the Englishman do more than look blandly 
incredulous at whatever secret tales he might hear. 
He would just inquire of the office of the Hudson's 
Bay Company, where he always learned that the 
tale was a joke out of the whole cloth. Not even 
the bankers of now booming Winnipeg would invest 
a dollar in buying Government land beyond the 
already well-defined wheat limits of IManitoba. It 
was the keen-scented Yankee who caught on. A group 
of bright men in St. Paul and Minneapolis heard 
in some way of the possibilities of the far north. 
They quietly sent their own experienced Minnesota 
and Dakota farm land experts and practical wheat 
judges up into Saskatchewan and Assiniboia to look, 
examine and report. This they did, and then the 
Americans began to buy direct of the Canadian Gov- 
ernment at Ottawa. Their expert investigators also 
had friends and neighbors who had money, who had 



NORTHWEST WHEAT LANDS. 29 

made money in farming, and some of them went up. 
All who went up staid, and sent back word of having 
got hold of a good thing. The first the world knew, 
fifty thousand American farmers went in last year, 
more than two hundred thousand have gone in this 
year, and the Canadian world and the English world 
have awakened to the fact that the bulk of the rich 
wheat lands of the far north are already owned by 
the American land companies, American banks and 
American farmers. In St. Paul to-day you can leara 
more about all this rich far north, and buy its best 
lands, rather than in Toronto or even in Winnipeg. 
Now the railroads are also beginning to stir them- 
selves. The Canadian Pacific Railway is to build 
more north branch lines. The Grand Trunk Pacific 
is to be built right through the Peace River country 
to Port Simpson, and everybody is astir to get a 
chance at the golden future. But the Americans have 
the cinch. And what is more, they do better and 
succeed when the Canadians, from Quebec or Ontario, 
and, above all, the Englishmen, make rank failures. 
The Americans have been farming on the same sort 
of land in Minnesota, in Iowa and in the Dakotas. 
They go into this new land with the same machinery 
and same methods. They all do well. Many of the 
Canadians fail, most of the English likewise, and the 
prospering American buys them out. Now, also, the 
Americans are beginning to find out that there is 
much good cattle range in this north land. The 



30 IN TO THE YUKON. 

American cattle men are coming up with their herds, 
even with their Mexican cowboys. 

No blizzards here, such as freeze and destroy- 
in Montana. No lack of water here the year round. 
No drouths like those of Texas. Nor is the still, quiet, 
steady cold of these plains more fatal, not as much 
so, as the more variable temperatures of the States. 
Not much snow over these northern plains, rarely 
more than a foot. The buffalo grass may be always 
reached through it. The mercury rarely more than 
fifty below zero, and so dry is the air and so still that 
no one minds that temperature. 

So we have it, that this entire rich wheat-yielding 
land of the far, far north, that the bulk of these 
grazing lands, tempered as the winter is by the warm 
Pacific climate, which here climbs over the rather 
low barrier of the Eockies, are falling into alert 
American hands. Even the storekeepers, they tell me, 
would rather trade with the American — he buys more 
freely, buys higher-priced machinery and goods; he 
is better pay in the end. "The Englishman brings 
out money, but after the first year or two it is gone. ' * 
**The American brings some and then keeps making 
more." So my Canadian drummer friend tells me, 
and he gathers his information from the storekeepers 
Id all these northwest towns with whom he deals. 
"Some even tell me," he said, "that if it wouldn't 
make any disturbance, why they would do better if 
all this country was part of the States." So the 
American is popular here, and he is growing rich, 



NORTHWEST WHEAT LiVNDS. 31 

richer than the Canadian and Englishman, and in 
course of time, I take it, he will even yet the more 
completely dominate the land. It is strange how the 
American spirit seems to have an energy and force 
that tells everywhere, in Canada as well as in Mex- 
ico. The information I give you here comes to me 
from the intelligent fellow-travelers I have chanced 
to meet, and, I take it, is probably a fair statement. 
We are some 4,500 feet above the sea, and the 
highest summits near us rise to about 10,000 or 11,000 
feet. There is none of the somber blackness of the 
Norwegian rocks, nor the greenness of the Swiss 
slopes, while the contour of the summits and ridges 
is much like that of the volcanic, serrated summits 
of the mountains I saw in Mexico, 



32 IN TO THE YUKON. 



THIRD LETTER. 

BANFF TO VANCOUVER ACROSS THE ROCKIES AND 
SELKIRKS. 

Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver, B. C.,\ 
August 19, 1903. / 

Our day crossing the Rockies was delightful. We 
left Banff about 2 p. m., following up the valley of 
the Silver Bow River to its very head. A deep valley, 
shut in on either hand by gigantic granite mountains, 
rising to 10,000 and 12,000 feet, their lower slopes 
covered with small fir, aspen, birch, then a sparse 
grass, and lichens, and then rising up into the clouds 
and eternal snows. Snow fields everywhere, and 
many glaciers quite unexplored and unnamed. The 
rise Vv^as so easy, however, that we were sur- 
prised when we actually attained the summit of the 
divide, where a mountain stream forks and sends its 
waters, part to Hudson's Bay, part to the Pacific. 
But the descent toward the west was precipitous. 
Smce leaving Winnipeg, two days and nights across 
plains and prairie, and a night and day up the 
valley of the Silver Bow River, we had steadily risen, 
but so gradually that we were almost unconscious of 
the ascending grade, but now we were to come down 
the 5,000 feet from the height of land and reach the 
Pacific in little more than a single day. Not so sheer 
a ride as down the Dal of the Laera River in Nor- 



ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 33 

way, 3,000 feet in three hours behind the ponies, 
but yet so steep that the iron horse crept at a snail 's 
pace, holding back the heavy train almost painfully, 
and descending into gorges and canons and shadowy 
valleys until one's hair nearly stood on end. How 
on earth they ever manage to pull and push the long 
passenger and short freight trains up these grades 
for the east-bound traffic, is a matter of amazement; 
that is, shove them up and make the business pay. 
At once, so soon as the divide was crossed, the 
influence of the warm, moist air of the Pacific was 
apparent. No longer the bare, bleak, naked masses 
of granite, no longer the puny firs and dwarf aspen 
and birches, but instead, the entire vast slopes of 
these gigantic mountain masses were covered with a 
dense forest. The tall Douglass firs stood almost 
trunk to trunk, so close together that the distant 
slopes looked as though covered with gigantic cover- 
lets of green fur. The trees seemed all about of one 
height and size. And the slopes were green right up 
to the snow field's very edge. Our way wound down 
the profound canon of the Kicking Horse River, some- 
times sheer precipices below and also above us, the 
road blasted out of the granite sides, then we swept 
out into the beautiful Wapta Valley, green as emer- 
ald, the white snow waters of the river— not white 
foam, but a muddy white like the snow-fed waters 
of the streams of Switzerland— roaring and plunging, 
and spreading out into quiet pools. At last we 
emerged through a gorge and swept into the great 



34 ' IN TO THE YUKON. 

wide, verdant valley of the British Columbia, from 
which the province takes its name. A river, even 
there on its upper reaches, as wide as the Ohio, but 
wild and turbulent, and muddy white from the melt- 
ing snows. Behind us the towering granite masses 
of the Rocky Mountains— a name whose meaning I 
never comprehended before — their peaks lost in 
clouds, their flanks and summits buried in verdure. 
The valley of the Columbia is wide and fertile. Many 
villages and farms and saw-mills already prospering 
along it. Here and there were indications of a devel- 
oping mine along the mountain slopes. We followed 
the great river until we passed through a narrow 
gorge where the Selkirk Mountain range jams its 
rock masses hard against the western flanks of the 
Rockies and the river thrusts itself between, to begin 
its long journey southward through Washington and 
Oregon to the Pacific; and then turning up a wild 
creek called Six Mile, we began again to climb the 
second and last mountain chain before we should reach 
the sea. These grades are very heavy. Too heavy, I 
should say, for a railroad built for business and traffic 
and not subsidized by a government, as in practical 
effect the Canadian Pacific is. The pass at the divide 
is almost as high as that at the source of the Silver 
Bow, and much more impeded in winter with snow- 
falls and avalanches, which require many miles of 
snow-sheds to save the road. 

We dined about 8 p. m., in a fine large hotel owned 
by the railroad company at a station called "Gla- 




A REACH OF THE FKASER RIVER. 



ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 37 

cier," for it is right at the foot of one of the most 
gigantic glaciers of the Selkirks, and many tourists 
tarry here to see it and climb npon it; Swiss guides 
being provided by the railway company for these 
adventures. And then we came down again, all night 
and half the next day, following the valley of the 
Fraser River until it debouched into level tidal 
reaches a few miles from Puget Sound. 

The Fraser River is a magnificent stream; as great 
as the Columbia, as wild as New River of West Vir- 
ginia. We stood upon the platform of the rear car 
and snapped the kodak at the flying gorges, tem- 
pestuous rapids and cascades. All along, wherever 
the water grew angry and spume spun, were Indians 
fishing for salmon, sometimes standing alert, intent, 
spear in hand poised and ready, or, more often, 
watching their nets or drawing them in. And every 
rocky point held its poles for drying the fish, belong- 
ing to some individual Indian 'or tribe, safe from tres- 
pass or molestation by immemorial usage. The sands 
of the river are said to also have been recently dis- 
covered to hide many grains of gold, and we saw in 
several places Chinamen industriously panning by 
the water-side. Near Vancouver we passed several 
extensive salmon canneries, and their catch this year 
is said to be unusually large. 

As we came nearer to the sea the air grew warmer, 
the vegetation more luxuriant, the flowers more pro- 
lific, and the Douglass fir more lofty and imposing. 
A single shaft, with sparse, ill-feathered limbs, down- 



88 IN TO THE YUKON. 

bent and twisted, these marvelous trees lift their un- 
gainly trunks above every other living thing about. 
The flowers, too, would have delighted you. Zinnias 
as tall as dahlias, dahlias as tall as hollyhocks, nas- 
turtiums growing like grape vines, roses as big as 
peonies, geraniums and heliotropes small trees. 
Great w^as the delight of our trainload of Australians. 
They had never seen such luxuriance of foliage, such 
wealth of flowers, except under the care of a gar- 
dener and incessant laying on of water. We came 
across with a car full of these our antipodean kin. 
Most have been ''home," to England, and had come 
across to Canada to avoid the frightful heats of the 
voyage by Suez and the Red Sea. And they mar- 
veled at the vigor and the activity of both Canada 
and the States. Some had lingered at the fine hotels 
up in the mountains now maintained by the Canadian 
Pacific Railroad. All were sorry to go back to the 
heats of the Australian continent. 

The building and maintaining of this railway has 
been accomplished by the giving of millions of dollars 
in hard cash, and millions of acres in land grants, to 
the railway company by the government of the Do- 
minion. Fortunes were made and pocketed by the 
promoters and builders, and the Canadian people 
now hold the bag — but although as a mere investment 
it can never pay, yet as a national enterprise it has 
made a Canadian Dominion possible. It owns its 
terminals on the Atlantic and on the Pacific, It 
owns its own telegraph lines, its own cars, sleeping- 




BIG DOUGLAS FIK — VANCOUVER PARK. 



ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 41 

cars, and rolling: stock; it owns and runs ten, a 
dozen, a score of fine hotels; it is a vast land-owner. 
Its stock can never be bought up and owned out of 
Canadian hands. A Morgan or a Gould can never 
seize it, manipulate it, or wreck it. It is a good thing 
for Canada to have it so. It is a good thing for the 
people of the United States that it is so. 

The Canadian Rockies are the most beautiful and 
picturesque of any section of the mountain chain 
from Mexico north. The air is cooler in the far 
northern latitude, keener, more bracing, and the 
hustling American has begun to find this out. The 
great hotels of the Canadian Pacific are already best 
patronized by the American visitor, and this year the 
sun-baked Californians have come up in swarms and 
promise another year even greater numbers. And the 
Canadian Pacific Railroad welcomes them all — all 
who can pay. At Banff, too, were the advance guard 
of the English Colony from China, brought over from 
Shanghai by the sumptuous steamships of the Ca- 
nadian Pacific Railway, taken to and kept at their 
great hotels, and carried home again, at so low a 
round-trip rate that these Rocky Mountain resorts 
promise to become the summering-place of the Orien- 
tal Englishmen as well as Australian and Californian! 
How these things bring the world together! 

Our journey from Kanawha, across Ohio, from 
Cleveland through the Great Lakes, across the wheat- 
fields of Minnesota and Dakota and Winnipeg, and 
over the wonderful prairies and plains of the opening 



42 IN TO THE YUKON. 

far Northwest, has had a fit ending in the last few 
days climbing and plunging over and down the wild- 
est, most picturesque, most stupendous valleys and 
passes of the Rocky Mountain and Selkirk Mountain 
ranges. How vast and varied and splendid is the 
continent we live on, and which one of these days 
the people of the United States will inevitably wholly 
possess ! 

And now the wonders of these Pacific slopes and 
waters! All the afternoon we have been wandering 
through Vancouver's superb Natural Park, among its 
gigantic trees, and gazing westward over and across 
the waters of Puget Sound, the most mighty fjord of 
the Pacific seas, the most capacious land-locked har- 
bor of the world. I must not say more about this 
now. I have not yet seen enough. I am only begin- 
ning dimly to comprehend what is the future power 
of our race and people in the development of this 
side of the earth. 

VICTORIA A SLEEPY ENGLISH TOWN. 

The Driard Hotel, Victoria, B. C.,\ 
August 21, 1903. / 

We came over here yesterday, leaving Vancouver 
by a fine new 1,800-ton steamer "Princess Victoria," 
and making the voyage in four hours, — all the way 
in and out among the islands and straits and inlets. 
The shores of the mainland high, lofty; — the moun- 
tain summits rising right up till snow capped, six or 
seven thousand feet in the air, their flanks green with 




VICTORIA, B. C. — THE HAKBOK. 



ACROSS THE ROCKIES. 45 

the dense forests of fir that here everywhere abound. 
The islands all fir-clad, the trees often leaning out 
over the deep blue waters. Many fishing-boats were 
hovering about the -points and shoals below the mouth 
of the Fraser River, awaiting the autumnal rush of 
salmon into the death-traps of that stream. I hope 
to see one of these salmon stampedes — they often 
pushing each other high and dry on the shores in 
their mad eagerness to go on. 

Tuesday we reached Vancouver. Wednesday we 
consumed seeing the lusty little city. 

Yesterday we spent the morning in picking up the 
few extra things needed for the Yukon — among other 
things a bottle of tar and carbolic— a mixture to rub 
on to offend the yet active mosquito. 

Vancouver is a city of some 30,000 people, full of 
solid buildings, asphalted streets, electric car lines, 
bustle and activity. Much of the outfitting for the 
Canadian Yukon is done there, though Seattle gets 
the bulk of even this trade. 

To-day we are in Victoria, a town of twelve or 
fifteen thousand, a fine harbor, and near it the British 
naval and military station of Esquimault, the seat of 
its North Pacific war power. The town is sleepy, the 
buildings low and solid, the air of the whole place 
very English. The capitol building is an imposing 
structure of granite, surmounted by a successful 
dome. 



46 IN TO THE YUKON. 



FOURTH LETTER. 

VANCOUVER AND SKAGV^AY; FJORDS AND FORESTS. 

FmsT AND Second Day Out, "1 
August 23, 1903. J 

We arrived in Vancouver by the steamer 
** Charmer" from Victoria about two o'clock a. m. — 
two hours late — a small boat, packed with passengers. 
We could not get a state-room to ourselves, so were 
glad of berths, while many people lay on mattresses 
in the cabin and many sat up. Tourist travel sur- 
prises the slow-going Canadian, and he does not catch 
up with it. 

We Avent to the Hotel Vancouver, where we had 
been staying, and there breakfasted. 

Our boat, ''City of Seattle," is roomy and com- 
fortable. We have a large upper state-room on the 
starboard side, plenty of fresh air and sunlight. It 
is loaded down with an immense cargo of miscel- 
laneous freight, from piles of boxes of Iowa butter 
and fresh eggs, to sheep and live stock, chickens and 
pigs, vegetables and canned goods, most of it billed 
to Dawson and even to points below. The Yukon 
has been so low this year — less snow than usual fall- 
ing last winter — that the bulk of the freight ''going 
in" has had to be shipped via these Skagway boats 
and the White Pass Railway, despite the exorbitant 
freight rates they are charging for everything. 




LEAVING VANCOUVER. 



VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 49 

The tourists are of two sorts. A good many 
making the round trip from Seattle and back, and the 
Yukoner ''going in" for the winter. The former are 
not of much concern to us, but among the latter I 
have found a number of interesting acquaintances. 
One, a man who hunts for a business, and is full of 
forest lore and hunting tales. He is also something 
of a naturalist and taxidermist, and I have been 
showing him our volumes of the report of the Harri- 
man Expedition, to his delight. He has also explored 
along the Kamtschatka coasts of Siberia, and de- 
scribes it as a land stocked with salmon and fur ani- 
mals. He says, too, that I have done right to bring 
along my gun, for there are lots of ptarmigan as well 
as mountain sheep and goats in the Yukon Valley, 
and caribou and moose are also plentiful. 

Another man has spent a year or more on the 
Yukon — our chief engineer — and thinks we will have 
no difficulty in getting a boat down from Dawson, and 
the scenery he says is grand. Another is a lumber- 
man of Wrangel — from Pennsylvania — and tells 
me they have some fine timber there, though most of 
that of these far northern latitudes is too small to now 
profitably compete with the big logs of Washington. 
Our vis-a-vis at table is going up to the Porcupine 
Placer district to try his luck with finding gold, 
and several men are going into Atlin — whither we are 
bound— to find work at big pay. 

The atmosphere of the company is buoyant and 



50 IN TO THE YUKON. 

hopeful, even the women have a dash of prosperity 
about them— gold chains and diamonds— of which 
there are not a few. 

From all I can pick up, an immense trade is al- 
ready developed with Alaska and is still growing with 
bounds. The United States Government statisticians 
give thirty-seven millions as the figure for the trade 
of the past year. Already three or four lines of steam- 
ers ply between Skagway alone and Puget Sound 
ports, and several more run to St. Michaels and Nome. 

The sail from Vancouver is most delightful. You 
come out of a narrow channel through which the 
tides foam and churn, and then turn north through 
the ''Gulf of Georgia,^' twenty or thirty miles wide. 
Vancouver Island stretches for three hundred miles 
along the west, fir-clad, backboned by a chain of 
mountains rising up into the snows. On the east a 
coast indented with multitudinous bays and deep 
channels, sharp promontories and islands; the for- 
est coming to the water's edge, the mountains rising 
sharply six and seven thousand feet into the snows 
and clouds, as lofty as the f jelde of Norway, but not 
60 bare and naked, the dense, deep green fir forests 
growing from water to snow line. 

We were crossing Queen Charlotte Sound when we 
awoke this morning, and all day long have been 
threading our way among islands, through narrow 
channels, across seemingly shut-in lakes, ten and 
twelve miles wide, and then no wider than the Ka- 
nawha River or even narrower. As we come north the 




AWAITING CARGO — VANCOUVER, B. C. 



VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 53 

mountains grow higher and come closer to the water 
we sail upon, and there is more snow on their sum- 
mits. 

You might imagine yourself with Henry Hudson 
on his first voyage, when the Hudson valley was cov- 
ered with primeval forests. 

Last evening we saw a number of humpbacked 
whales, and to-day more. This morning saw my first 
sea lions and also fur and hair seals. To-morrow, they 
say, we shall see yet more. Only gulls, a few terns 
and ducks to-day. No larger birds as yet. 

Monday, Angnst 24, 1903. 

The greyness of yesterday has vanished. The sky 
is cloudless, the atmosphere translucent. The moun- 
tains are more lofty, the snow patches grown into 
wide fields, and the air has taken on a certain added 
keenness, telling of distant snow and ice. To-morrow 
we shall see more snow and even glaciers. All day we 
have been going from one broad sound or channel 
through narrow straits into others as broad. We 
crossed Dixon's Channel at breakfast-time, through 
which the commerce of the Orient will come to 
Port Simpson, the Canadians hope, when the Grand 
Trunk Pacific shall have been built. 

About noon we came around a wooded island and 
made our first port of Ketchikan, where there are sal- 
mon canneries, and hard by quartz mines yielding 
gold, and saloons and stores. Here we had our first 
view of near-by totem poles, and our first sight of the 



54 IN TO THE YUKON. 

shoals of salmon that make alive these waters. From 
a foot-bridge crossing a little creek that debouched 
near our steamer wharf, we looked down into the 
clear water and saw it fairly swarming with salmon, 
fish from ten to fifteen pounds, ''small ones," they 
said. But the waters were choked with them. Dip- 
ping a net down, you might haul up a wagon load as 
easily as one. Yet no one was catching them. So 
plentiful are the fish that no one wants to eat salmon 
except as a last resort— ''food fit only for dogs," they 
say, and the distant tenderfeet whom the canneries 
supply. And these swarming fish below us shoved 
each other upon the shallow shore continually, when 
there would be a great splashing to get back. 

From Ketchikan we have come out into the great 
Clarence Strait, with Belim and Ernest Sounds 
stretching away into the snow-covered mountains to- 
ward the east. The strait is as wide as the Hudson 
at the Palisades, the shores fir clad, the mountains 
six to seven thousand feet, up into clouds and snow. 
The water to-day is like a mirror, and many por- 
poises are playing about. I have just seen three big 
blue herons, and awhile ago we passed a loon. Last 
night just at dusk, we saw several flocks of snipe or 
plover, small, brown, swift in flight, close above the 
water. 

"We have just looked upon the most superb pano- 
rama we have yet beheld. The last four hours the 
mountains both east and west of us have come closer 
to the shores, and risen higher, the fir mantle envel- 




TOTEM POIJ:s AT KETCHIKAN. 




GLACIERS ON FREDERICK SOUND. 



VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 59 

oping them has grown a darker green, larger timber 
than for the last few hundred miles, and then we 
came round a bend in our great strait — about six 
to ten miles wide — forty or fifty miles long — and there 
in front of us, bounding the horizon on the north, 
stretched an immense mass of jagged, serrated moun- 
tain chain, glittering like silver in the slanting sun 
rays. Not mere snow patches, not mere fields of snow, 
but vast "fjellen" of snow, snow hiding all but the 
most ragged rock peaks, and even sometimes envelop- 
ing these. Valleys all snow-filled and from which de- 
scend mighty glaciers. Below the miles of snow lay 
the deep green forests of the lesser mountain sum- 
mits and sloping flanks, and then the dark blue waters 
of the giant fjord, dotted with many fir-clad islands. 
We agree that we have seen nothing in our lives so 
sublimely beautiful. Never yet nature on so stu- 
pendous a scale. 

The quiet waters of the last two days are now alive 
with gulls and ducks and grebes and divers, many 
loons. More bird life than we have yet seen. Just 
as is told by the Harriman naturalist. Only at Wrang- 
el does the real bird life of the north begin. Curv- 
ing around another wooded promontory, we beheld 
the town of Wrangel, at Fort Wrangel, on Wrangel 
Island, ten miles away, nestling at the mouth of a 
little valley, below the firs and snow summits behind. 
We are now tied up to the pier at this port, and shall 
lie here till 2 a. m., when flood tide will allow us to 
continue the voyage, and at daylight pass through the 



60 IN TO THE YUKON. 

narrowest and most hazardous strait of the trip. We 
mean to be waked at four o'clock so as to see the 
pass. 

In the village, which claims to be the second town 
in Alaska, we have walked about and seen some of the 
totem poles which stand before many of the Indian 
cabins. Grotesque things, surely. 

It is now near nine o'clock and yet the lingering 
twilight permits one to read. At Dawson, they tell 
me, there is in June no night, and baseball matches 
are played at 10 p. M. 

August 25, 1903. 
We did not leave Wrangel till 2 a. m,, lying there 
waiting for the flood of the tide. We were to pass 
through the very tortuous, narrow and difficult straits 
and passages between Wrangel Bay and Frederick 
Sound, through which the tides rush with terrific 
fury— the tides rise twenty or thirty feet along these 
shores— and the ship would only venture at flood tide 
and after dawn. In order to see these picturesque 
passages, I climbed out between three and four o 'clock 
this morning, wrapped in a blanket shawl above my 
overcoat, and stood in the ice-chilled air while we 
threaded slowly our dangerous way. Along sheer 
mountain-sides, between low wooded islands (all fir), 
a channel carefully marked with many buoys and 
white beacons, with many sharp turns, finally enter- 
ing the great Frederick Sound, where many whales 
were blowing, and we saw our first real icebergs — 




APPROACHING FORT W RAXGEL. 




THE PIER— FOKT WRANGEL. 



VANCOUVER AND SKAGWAY. 63 

masses of ice, blue and green, translucent, with deep, 
clear coloring. 

All day we have sailed up this great land-locked 
sheet of blue water, the icebergs and floes increasing 
in number as we approached Taku Inlet, from whose 
great live glaciers they are incessantly shed off. 

4 p. M. — We have landed at the Treadwell Mines 
on Douglass Island, where the largest stamp mill in 
the world crushes a low grade quartz night and day 
the year around, and where is gathered a mining 
population of several thousand. Then we crossed the 
fjord to the bustling port of Juneau, the would-be 
capital of Alaska, the rival of Sitka. A curious little 
town of wooden buildings, wooden streets, wooden 
sidewalks, nestling under a mighty snow-capped 
mountain, and, like those other towns, largely built 
on piles, on account of the tides. 

Now we are off for Skagway, a twelve hours' run 
with our thirteen-knot speed. 

To-day we have fallen in with two more fellow-trav- 
elers. One a young fellow named Baldwin, attached 
to the U. S. Fish Commission, who tells me much 
about the fishing on these coasts, and the efforts now 
being made to stay the indiscriminate slaughter. An- 
other, a grave-faced, sturdy man from Maine who is 
panning free gold near Circle City, and has endured 
much of hardship and suffering. He hopes to win 
enough this winter and coming summer from his 
claim to go back to California and make a home for 
his old mother who waits for him there. 



64 IN TO THE YUKON. 

Skagway, Alaska, Wednesday, August 25. 

Here we are, safe and sound after a voyage due 
north four days and four nights, more than 1,500 
miles— I do not know just how far. We came out 
from Juneau last night in a nasty rain, mist (snow- 
rain almost) and wind driving against the rushing 
tides. Coming around Douglass Island in the teeth 
of the gale, we passed over the very spot where a year 
or two ago the ill-fated S. S. "Islander" struck a 
sunken iceberg, and went down into the profound 
depths with all on board. As I heard the moan 
of the winds, the rain splash on our cabin window, 
and hearkened to the roar of the whirling tides against 
whose currents we were entering the great Lynn Ca- 
nal — fjord we should say — ninety miles or more long 
— ten to fifteen miles wide — I could not help but think 
of the innumerable frail and lesser boats that dared 
these dangerous waters in the first mad rush to the 
Klondike but a few short years ago. In the darkness 
we have passed many fine glaciers, and along the bases 
of immense snow and ice crested mountains, which 
we are sorrry not to have seen, but so much is now 
before us that our minds are already bent toward the 
great Yukon. 

We are tied to an immense pier, and mechanical 
lifters seem to be dragging out the very entrails of 
the ship. Across the line of the warehouses I see the 
trucks of the railway, the hackmen are crying out 
their hotels. "This way, free 'bus to the Fifth Ave- 
nue Hotel," I hear. 




thk: pikk, skagway 




LYNN CANAL FK03I THE SUMMIT OF 
WHITE PASS. 



!S»i»««'i<«S«"?«-5JK»^" 




LOOKING DOWN WHITE PASS 




THE SUMMIT— WHITE PASS. 



CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 69 



FIFTH LETTER. 

SKAGWAY, CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 

Atlin, British Columbia, August 29, 1903. 

Here we are at the mining camp of Atlin, on At- 
lin Lake. We left Skagway the same morning of 
arrival. Our boat, the "City of Seattle," came in 
early Wednesday morning, and long before we got 
up we heard them discharging cargo, all hands at 
work. The day was cloudy, cold, and icy ^vinds 
swept down from the glaciers. It seemed November. 
The little town is built on a low sand tongue of de- 
tritus carried down from the glaciers by the snow 
rivers, the river Skagway here pouring out a flood of 
muddy white water like the Swiss streams. 

The railway is a narrow, three-foot gauge, and the 
cars are low but roomy. Our train consisted of nine 
freight cars, a baggage, two passenger cars and three 
locomotives, one in front and two in the middle. The 
famous ride was all that has been said of it. First, 
a gradual ascent up the deep valley of the Skagway, 
then steep climbing and many doubles and winds up 
through the canon to the summit, twenty miles away, 
and 3,200 feet above the sea. In many places the 
road-bed is blasted out of the granite rock, sheer 
precipices above and below, a most costly piece of 
Avork, and ever down below winds the difficult, dan- 
gerous trail, over which fifty to one hundred thou- 



70 IN TO THE YUKON. 

sand men and women footed it in the winters of 1897- 
1898, in the strange, mad world-rush to the fabulous 
gold fields of the interior. How they got up and 
through at all is the wonder; yet men tell me that 
men, pack-laden, footsore, determined, were so closely 
massed along the trail that it was one continuous line 
from Skagway to summit and beyond, for months at 
a time. The various views from our car were mag- 
nificent and even appalling; sometimes we seemed 
to hang in mid-air as we crawled upward. As we 
approached the summit we came among snow fields 
and near many glaciers, and then passed through 
long snow-sheds over which the avalanches often 
slip and thunder into the abysses below. 

Near the divide is the international boundary line, 
and the customs station for Alaska and the Yukon 
Territory of Canada, and where the red-coated Can- 
adian mounted police come first in evidence. Here 
our bags were examined by the customs. Then we 
began a gradual descent into wide, open, flat valleys, 
over bare granite rock masses and through a stunted 
fir wilderness into the basin of the Yukon, 2,600 
miles from the Behring Sea at St. Michaels. Flocks 
of ptarmigan flew up as the train rolled down, and a 
few eagles soared high above the snow summits. 

Our first stop was at a railway eating-house near 
the head of Lake Bennett, a sheet of light green 
water, two to ten miles wide and over thirty miles 
long, all shut in by gigantic granite mountains whose 
summits were covered with glittering snow. The rail- 




THE INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY. 




EARLY SEPTEMBER SNOW, CARIBOU CROSSING. 




CARIBOU CROSSING. 



CVRIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 75 

way skirts the water for the entire distance until it 
crosses at a bridge over a swift current where Lake 
Bennett flows into Lake Marsh, and where is the sta- 
tion of Caribou. 

Here we were put off, and here we would, two 
days later, take the bi-weekly steamer for Atlin, on 
Atlin Lake, where we now are, and here the railway 
leaves the lakes and takes a short cut across a low 
divide to White Horse Rapids, where begins the 
steamboat navigation on the Yukon River. 

Caribou is a collection of cabins and tents, and 
is the first settlement where, they say, will some day 
be a city. 

It was on Lake Bennett that the weary pilgrims 
used to camp to build their boats and rafts and be- 
gin their long water journey of five hundred miles 
to Dawson and the golden Klondike. 

Our hotel we found surprisingly neat and clean; 
owned and kept by a famous Indian, ''Dawson Char- 
lie,'' who was one of the discoverers of the gold of 
Bonanza Creek in the Klondike, and who had the 
sense to himself stake out several claims, the gold 
from which has made him now a magnate worth sev- 
eral hundred thousand dollars, and who lives and en- 
tertains like a white man. He housed us in a neat, 
comfortable room, iron bedstead, wire mattress, car- 
peted floor. He fed us at fifty cents a meal as well, 
as abundantly as in West Virginia, and only his 
Indian daughter, who waited on us, dressed neatly 
and fashionably, with big diamonds in her ears, 



76 IN TO THE YUKON. 

made us realize that we were not in our own land. 
Here we have spent two delightful days. The air is 
as wonderfully clear as on the table-lands of Mexico, 
full of ozone, but cold in the shadow even in midday, 
though the sun is warm. 

On the ship we met a delightful naturalist, 
Mr. Baldwin, of New Haven, artist of the U. S. 
Fish Commission, and who came with us to try and 
catch some grayling, in order to make drawings for 
the Commission, and for two days we have been out 
in the woods, he with my rod, H with your but- 
terfly net, and I with my gun. He caught his gray- 
ling, several of them. I shot several mallard ducks, 

but H caught no butterflies, nor saw one. It 

was too late in the season for that. 

On the way up we fell in with a very intelligent 
Swede, whose partner in the Klondike is a Dane, 

and who, when he learned H 's nationality, and 

she had talked Danish with him, was all courtesy 
and friendliness. He had come in with the ''mush- 
ers" (corruption of the French marche), as the early 
foot-farers are called, and had succeeded. When we 
get to Dawson he will welcome us. 

At Caribou we also made acquaintance with the 
Canadian customs officer, Mr. John Turnure, a fine 
t3q)e of Canadian official, big, blufl^, yet courteous, 
who at first was going to tax all my cartridges and 
kodak films, notwithstanding I had passed the cus- 
toms at Winnipeg and had come from Vancouver 
direct, but who, upon explanation, relented, and after- 




A VISTA ON LAKE MARSH. 




ON THE TRAIL AT CARIBOU. 




VIEW NEAR CARIBOU CROSSING. 



CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 81 

ward called on lis and invited H- , Mr. B and 

myself to call on his wife and family at his log 
cabin mansion near the station, which we did, and 
w^ere served cake and cojffiee from dainty china, and 
sat on a divan covered with priceless furs, near a 
good piano. His daughters were now at home from 
school on vacation, and his wife, a cultured woman, 
was next day going with them on a shopping visit 
to Dawson, the New York or Cincinnati of this far 
north. 

The Yukon territory is governed from Ottawa 
by appointees, and policed by the ''NortWest Mount- 
ed Police," a fine body of men— including many 
young Englishmen of good family— in cowboy hats 
and red coats. While here in Atlin, we are just over 
the line in the Province of British Columbia, a state 
with its own laws and civil magistrates. 

We left Caribou on a little steamer with a big 
stemwheel — all of which, timber and machinery, had 
been carried from Skagway over the White Pass on 
horses' backs, and sledges, dragged by men and dogs, 
and put together on Lake Bennett, before the rail- 
way was even thought of. How in the name of 
heaven a ten-ton boiler, and the engines and big 
timbers, were got over that foot-path trail, is even 
yet a standing marvel— the boat is as big as the 
steamer ''Calvert" on the Kanawha River— but it was 
done, and to-day I have talked with the man who 
bossed and directed the job, Captain Irving, now a 



82 IN TO THE YUKON. 

gold hunter of Atliii and a member of the British 
Columbia Parliament. 

We first came slowly through a well-marked track 
on a little lake, Lake Marsh, for about ten miles, 
then through a short river, and then out into 
Lake Taggish, a sheet of water larger than 
Lake Bennett, and one arm of which is famous 
for its desperate winds from the glaciers— the 
*' hurricane" arm — another arm of which heads to- 
ward the White Horse Rapids, and a third arm, 
"The Taku Arm," which extends southerly to- 
ward Lake Atlin, a lake more than one hundred 
miles in length, and empties into it through a 
short, swift, turbulent river. This southerly portion 
of the lake is eight or ten miles wide and we were 
all night steaming on it to Taku, where we landed 
this morning — a distance of forty or fifty miles — when, 
taking a little, short, two-mile railway, we were pulled 
over to Atlin Lake, a yet bigger body of water. 
There embarking on another steamboat, we were fer- 
ried ten miles across to Atlin, a town with a court- 
house, several churches, a little hospital, a newspa- 
per, a bank, a dozen hotels, a multitude of restau- 
rants, bicycles, numerous livery stables, and which 
is the center of a gold-mining region from which 
already several millions of dollars have been taken 
since the first pay dirt was found in 1898. We 
dined at a restaurant where a colored French cook 
presides, and you may have any delicacy New York 
could afford. At the bars men preside with diamonds 




THE TAlvU RIVER. 



CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 87 

the size of hickory nuts in their shirts, drinks are 
twenty-five cents each and cigars the same. The ho- 
tels are full of keen-faced men; well-gowned and 
refined women are to be seen on the streets; the baby 
carriages are pulled by great big dogs, and even 
the water carts and delivery wagons are hauled by 
teams of eight and ten dogs — Newfoundland or wolf- 
ish Esquimaux. 

**The Camp," or city, is now in the midst of a 
boom, and this morning we were shown several buck- 
ets of gold nuggets just brought in last night from a 
recent ^' clean up." 

When in the midst of Lake Taggish, yesterday 
afternoon, we were hailed by a naphtha launch of the 
Mounted Police, and, laying to, three gentlemen 
climbed in. One face seemed in some way familiar 
to me, and when I presently heard some one call him 
Mr. Sutton I recognized one of my old Port Hope 
schoolmates, who had also been at Cornell, and who 
had been an especial friend. He was as well pleased 
as I at the meeting, and is now here with me. He 
was a brilliant scholar, and is now British Columbia's 
most eminent geologist and mining expert. We have 
been out together to-day, and to have his expert opin- 
ion here on what I see is invaluable. We have also 

met here a Mr. and Mrs. R , of Philadelphia, to 

whom I had a letter, a promoter of the largest hy- 
draulic company here, and H has been off with 

Mrs. R to-day and panned her first chunks of 

real, true, genuine gold, of which performance she 



88 IN TO THE YUKON. 

is not a little proud. The whole country seems to be 
more or less full of gold; it is in the gravels and 
sands everywhere, and a number of very large gold- 
getting enterprises are under Avay, mostly hydraulic 
placer mining, but also some fine quartz veins carry- 
ing free gold are being opened up, and I have been 
off with Sutton all the afternoon looking at one. 

September 1, 1903. 
We have had three days of outing ; at least, I have. 
Saturday morning I made an early start with Sut- 
ton and three other men for a visit to some hydraulic 
mining operations up on Pine Creek, and to the great 
dredge now being built. At one of these, an opera- 
tion called "The Sunrise Gold Co.," I found in 
charge a Mr. Ruffner, of Cincinnati, a cousin to 
the Kanawha family, grandson of one of the orig- 
inal Ruffner brothers, who, hating slavery, had freed 
his slaves and removed to free soil in Ohio. A 
bright young fellow, managing a large operation. 
Then we w^ent on further to Gold Run, where an 
enormous dredge is being built. An experiment in 
this country, about the final success of which there 
is yet much question. Here I dined in a tent, which 
is warmer, they say, than any timber building, even 
when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero. The 
valley is a broad, open one, all of glacial formation. 
It is very level, with Pine Creek cutting deeply be- 
tween high gravel banks. A black top soil of a foot 
or two, eight or ten feet of grey gravel, then as 




ATLIN BAGGAGE EXPRESS. 




ATLIN CITY WATEK WORKS. 



CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 91 

much more yellowish sandy gravel, and often a foot 
or two of black sand at the bottom, lying upon a 
bed of serpentine rock; and it is in this lowest ten 
feet of yellow gravel and black sand that the free 
gold is found, nuggets of a pound or two down to 
minute gold dust, a red gold of about 22 to 23 carats 
in combination with copper or silver. Through this 
gravel are also immense stones and boulders, and these 
are the gold diggers' particular bete noir. Most of 
the digging is done by getting out this gravel, free- 
ing it of the boulders and washing it. Pine Creek 
is the overflow of Surprise Lake, a sheet of water 
twenty miles long and one-half to one mile wide; 
and although a considerable stream, yet its waters 
are so much needed in these gold-washing operations 
that a constant water-war among the diggers and 
digging companies goes on. There is much waste 
also in the present methods, and it is to prevent the 
wars as well as to save the fine gold that now largely 
escapes that the dredging method is to be applied. 
Then, too, there are only four, or at most five, months 
in the year when men can work, so that great energy 
must be expended during the open season. There 
is no night up here for these four months, and men 
work all the twenty-four hours in eight-hour shifts; 
thus, really, more work is done than one would at 
first imagine. The life of the ideally successful gold 
digger is to toil with unflagging vigor for the four 
or five months of daylight and open weather, then 
**come out" and blow it in in leisurely luxury in 



92 IN TO THE YUKON. 

some comfortable city. But not all are so able to 
make their summer pile. They may not strike rich 
pay dirt, but may find it lean, or even barren, and 
such must just live on' through ice and snow and 
mighty frost, hoping for more luck another year. 
Many are the tales of hardship and suffering and 
dire wreck one hears. The little graveyard out along 
the Pine Creek pike has many graves in it. One 
man died a natural death, they say, but all the rest 
went to their graves stark mad from disappoint- 
ment, poverty and privation. Every train passing 
out over the White Pass Railway carries its comple- 
ment of the hopelessly insane, gone mad in the hunt 
for gold. 

In this little town or ''camp," as it is called, are 
very many too poor to get away, too broken in 
health and spirits to more than barely exist. A deli- 
cate woman, once the wife of the mayor of an Illi- 
nois city, does our washing; her husband, a maimed 
and frozen cripple, sits penniless and helpless while 
she earns a pittance at the tub. Our landlady lets 
rooms to lodgers, her husband's body lying beneath 
the deep waters of Teslin Lake. 

An Oxford Senior wrangler passed us yesterday 
on the road driving two dogs hitched to a little 
wagon, peddling cabbages and fish. A few strike 
gold, and, making their piles, depart, but the many 
toil hopelessly on, working for a wage, or frozen or 
crippled, weary in spirit and out of heart, sink into 
penury, or die mad. 




GOVEKINMKXT iMAlL CROSSING LAIiE ATLIN. 




MINER S CABIN ON SPRUCE CREEK — ATLIN 
GOLD DIGGINGS. 



CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 95 

After our dinner in the tent I joined another 
party, some of those interested in the building of 
the dredge, and drove with them twenty miles up 
into the interior to Otter Creek, where three of them 
have just started an operation, sluicing for gold. We 
passed many cabins and small tents, where live the 
men who are working claims and washing for gold. 
Some were quite shut down for lack of water, others 

were eagerly at work. At one point a Mr. S 

and I left the wagon and struck six miles across a 
great grassy mountain. We must have ascended 
2,000 feet or more. An easy ascent over a vast ex- 
panse of moss and tufted grass; no trees, no bushes, 
no hardy herbs, nothing but grass and moss. Only 
on the south and west was the horizon bounded by 
jagged peaks and summits of snow-topped moun- 
tains. Glacial action has everywhere worn down the 
surface into rounded rolling domes and slopes, and 
for hundreds of miles the land is one wide moorland 
of grass and moss. 

Here are many flocks of wild sheep and mountain 
goats, and here moose and caribou are said to abound. 
During the day, about the noon hour, a giant bull 
moose had stalked deliberately through the midst of 
the camp, neither quickening his pace, nor fearing 
man. So engrossed were the men in their search for 
gold, that none dropped pick or shovel to molest him. 

On these higher slopes are multitudes of ptarmigan. 
The birds breeding close to the permanent snow line, 
remaining high up during the summer heats, and 



96 IN TO THE YUKON. 

gradually descending to the valleys as the fresh fall- 
ing autumnal snows little by little push them down. 

In Atlin, the other day, a young Swedish engi- 
neer, a graduate of Upsala, showed me a fine pair 
of ibex horns from one which he had shot high up 
on the mountains beyond the lake. The animal, 
though not uncommon, is difficult to get, inhabiting 
the most inaccessible summits and rarely descending 
to even the levels where the mountain sheep and goats 
find pasture. 

A superb and seemingly boundless pasture land 
where great herds of cattle ought also to be feeding, 
and would be, except for the terror of the winter's 
cold. Perhaps the reindeer will some day here find 
a congenial home. 

We sat by fires after nightfall, and when day 
came icicles a foot long hung all along the drip of 
the flume, and in the afternoon snow fell, covering 
every rounded summit with its white mantle. 

Returning, I walked another ten miles down the 
winding valley of Otter Creek. A stretch of open, 
grassy moorland, where in the winter-time the moose 
and caribou gather in numbers seeking shelter from 
the winds, and finding the dried grass through the 
scraped-off snow. 

To-day H , Sutton and I have driven for hours 

along the valley of Spruce Creek, visiting another 
industrious gold-washing section. We picnicked for 

lunch in an abandoned miner's camp, and H 

saw her first real washing for gold. We took the 




FINDING "COLOR, " A GOOD STRIKE, OTTER 
CREEK, B. C. 




SLUICING 1 OR GOLD. OTTER CREEK, B. C. 




ALI KKL) SITTON— AN A Tl.lX GOLD-IHGGKK. 



CARIBOU CROSSING AND ATLIN. 101 

picture of one old man, a Mr. Alfred Sutton, in 
whose cabin we had sought shelter from a passing 
rain squall. He had hoped to return to England 
for the winter — he left there many years ago— but 
the gold had not come in as rich as he had hoped, 
so he must delay his going for one more year. Poor 
old fellow, his beard was long and white, so, too, 
his uncombed hair. He had not yet made his yellow 
pile, but was as hopeful as a boy of twenty. I 
promised to send him a copy of the photograph and 
he thanked me joyfully, saying, ''And I shall send 
it to my family at home" — in England. 

We are here two days longer, when we move on 
to Dawson and I mail these lines to you. 

September 3. 1903. 

This is our last day in Atlin. The morning was 
cold like late November in Virginia, the air keen 
and frosty. Ice has formed in the pools, though the 
aspen and scrub willow and a sort of stunted alder 
are only turned yellow in spots and patches. The 
mountain-tops are now all whitened with the delicate 
early snows, extending like blankets of hoar-frost 
out beyond the margins of the snow fields that never 
melt. 

We dine sumptuously, and all through the gold 
fields it is the same. The one thing men will and 
must have is food, good food and no stint. The most 
expensive canned goods, the costliest preserves, the 
most high-priced fresh fruits, oranges, bananas, pears 



LofG. 



102 IN TO THE YUKON. 

and grapes, the finest beef steaks and meats, the 
most ample variety of vegetables. Such an average 
as New York gives only in her best hotels, is what 
the gold digger demands, will have, and freely spends 
his nuggets to obtain. We are astonished at such 
lavish eating. At the diggings where men work for 
wages, $4.50 and $5.00 per day, board is always in- 
cluded and demanded, and only this high-priced, 
costly food is accepted. The cooks are connoisseurs. 
Their wages run from $125.00 to $150.00 per month 
and free board. At the camp high amidst the deso- 
late moorlands of Otter Creek, the men eat beef 
steaks, thick, juicy, rare, California fresh fruit and 
lemon meringue pie ; with lemons $1.00 per dozen 
and eggs ten cents apiece ! Dundee marmalade is 
eaten by the ton; the costliest canned cream is swal- 
lowed by the gallon — the one permitted, recognized 
and established extravagance of the gold fields is 
the sumptuous eating of every man who finds the 
gold. 

This afternoon Sutton and ourselves with a few 
friends are going down to see the great glacier at 
the south end of Lake Atlin. 



GREAT LLEWELLEN GLACIER. 103 



SIXTH LETTER. 

THE GREAT LLEWELLEN OR TAKU GLACIER. 

Caribou, September 4, 1903. 

We have just come in on the steamboat from 
Atlin, and are waiting for the train which will take 
us to White Horse this afternoon, where we will 
take a river boat to Dawson. 

Day before yesterday we took the little steamboat 
that plies across Atlin Lake, having chartered it with 
Sutton, and having asked a Mr. Knight, of Philadel- 
phia, and Captain Irvine, of Victoria, making a party 
of five, and went to the head of the lake — forty-five 
miles. A lovely sail. Up the narrow mountain- 
locked channel on the west of Goat Island (named 
from the many wild goats on it). The water a clear, 
deep blue and light green, according to its depth. 
The mountains chiefly granite, rising sheer up on 
either hand four and five thousand feet; the fir for- 
est, dense and sombre, clothing their bases, then run- 
ning out to ground pine and low shrubs, then the 
grass and mosses, then the bare rocks and jagged 
crags and the everlasting snows. The lake channel 
is everywhere narrow, sometimes widening out to five 
or six miles, then narrowing into a mile or two, but 
the air is so wonderfully translucent that ten miles 
look like one, and distant shores seem close at hand. 
The further we sailed the narrower grew the chan- 



104 IN TO THE YUKON. 

nel, until we were among islands and canons, with i 
sheer snow-capped heights hanging above us, at last 
slowly creeping through a tortuous passageway of 
still water out into a long, silent arm, at whose head 
we tied up to the forest for the night. These clear 
waters are filled with trout and grayling — the latter 
chiefly, but of birds there were almost none. Only 
a belated and startled great blue heron flapped lazily 
away to the west. Using our glasses, we saw two or 
three wild goats up on the heights above us, and 
probably many more saw us far down below. 

In the morning we breakfasted early, and started ' 
for the glacier — the great Llewellen or Taku gla- 
cier, said to be the largest in the British possessions 
of North America, sixty miles long to where it comes 
to Taku Bay, near Juneau, and is there known as 
Taku glacier. We clambered over a mile of trail, 
through dense, close-growing fir, then out into a wide 
plain of detritus, once covered by the ice, now two 
miles long by a mile wide. Difficult walking, all 
glacial drift, and boulders great and small. The 
distance to the vast slope of dirty ice seemed only a 
little way; nothing but the walk would convince one 
that it was over two miles. The glacier projects in 
a great bow. On its center, like a hog-back mane, 
are piled masses of earth and rocks. It is there that 
the moving ice river is. On either side the ice is 
almost still and white. For five or ten miles the 
glacier rises toward an apparent summit and stretches 
toward the coast, fed by a multitude of lesser ice 



GREAT LLEWELLEN GLACIER. 105 

streams issuing from every mountain gorge and val- 
ley, while monstrous masses of rock, granite and 
porphyry, tower into the snows and clouds above it. 
We had some difficulty in climbing upon the glacier. 
Chasms opened on either side, the front was a crack- 
ing ice cliff, crevasses yawned everywhere. Though 
the surface was dirty and blackened, yet down in the 
cracks and crevasses the wonderful blue ice ap- 
peared. From the base of the glacier flows a river, 
and over its surface coursed a thousand rills. 

We walked upon the ice and lingered near it 
till about noon, when our boat took us back to Atlin 
through the greater lake, along the east shores of 
Goat Island, a four hours' sail. 

From Atlin we have returned as we went, and 
are now spending a few hours here. There are very 
few birds on Atlin Lake, though I saw a superb loon 
yesterday near the western shore. 

Ice formed on the lake last night. Snow is in 
the air. We may be too late to come down the Yukon 
from Dawson. 



106 IN TO THE YUKON. 



SEVENTH LETTER. 

VOYAGING DOWN THE MIGHTY YUKON. 

Dawson, September 5, 1903. 
This letter is headed Dawson, for I shall mail 
it there, but I begin it at White Horse, a thriving 
town of over 2,000 people, on the west bank of the 
Fifty Mile River, just below the famous rapids. The 
streets are wide, of hard gravel, many large build- 
ings. We are in the ''Windsor" Hotel, a three- 
storied wooden structure, iron bedsteads, wire mat- 
tresses, modern American oak furniture — very com- 
fortable, but as all the partitions are of paper— no 
plaster — you can hear in one room all that is said 
on six sides of you — above and below, too. The 
city and hotel are electric-lighted. Many churches, 
a commodious public school, public hall and read- 
ing-room supplied with all current American, Cana- 
dian and English magazines. The town is up to 
date. It is at the head of the Yukon navigation, 
where those "going out" take the White Pass and 
Yukon Railway for Skagway, and those ''going in" 
take the boats for "Dawson." Just now the town 
is half deserted, many of its inhabitants having stam- 
peded to the new Kluhane gold strike, some one hun- 
dred and forty miles away. It is here claimed that 
a new Eldorado as rich as the Klondike has been 
found, and White Horse now expects to yet rival 




BISHOP AND MRS. BUMPUS. 



DOWN THE YUKON. 109 

Dawson. Extensive finds of copper ore of high grade 
are also reported in the neighborhood. 

We arrived at Caribou yesterday morning on the 
little S. S. '' Scotia," built on Lake Bennett, after a 
very comfortable night, and went over to Dawson 
Charlie's hotel for a good breakfast. By this time 

H and the Indian housekeeper had become fast 

friends, and the girl accordingly brought out her 

store of nuggets and nugget jewelry for H to 

see. A lovely chain of little nuggets linked together, 
a yard or more long, earrings, breastpins, buckles, 
and sundry nuggets, large and small. It is Dawson 
Charlie's habit, when in a good humor, to give her 
one of the pocketful of nuggets he usually carries 
around. 

We crossed the bridge over the rushing outflow 
of Lake Bennett and went down to the Indian vil- 
lage, and called on old Bishop Bumpus and his 
quaint, white-haired wife. For over forty-five years 
he has wrought among the Indians of the Peace River, 
the Mackenzie and Yukon watersheds. He is an old 
man, but as erect as a Cree brave. His diocese is 
now limited to the Yukon waters, where, he says, 
are about 1,000 Indians, and, of course, an increas- 
ing number of white men. They lived in this back, 
wild country long before the white men thought of 
gold, or the Indian knew of its value. I took their 
pictures and promised to send them copies. 

This morning we have walked a few miles up the 
river to see the celebrated White Horse Rapids, and 



110 IN TO THE YUKON. 

I went four miles further, and saw also the Miles 
Canon, wliere the waters of Lake Taggish and Fifty 
Mile River begin their wild six miles before reaching 
here. The canon is sharply cleft in trap rock, and the 
sides rise sheer and pilastered as though cut into 
right-angled pillars. These cliffs rise up 200 feet 
or more and go down as deep below the foaming 
tide. The cleft does not seem more than 100 yards 
wide, and through it the waters boil and roar. How 
the early gold hunters ever got through the furious 
waters alive is the wonder, and indeed very many 
did lose their lives here, as well as in the dashing 
rapids below. 

On the Yukon, September 7, 1903. 
We have boarded the steamer "White Horse/' 
whose captain is commodore of the Yukon fleet — 
twenty-odd large steamers owned by the White Pass 
& Yukon Ry. Co. We have a stateroom at the rear 
of the texas, with a window looking out behind as 
well as at the side. I can lie in my berth and see 
the river behind us. We swung out into the swift 
blue current about a quarter to seven, yet bright 
day, the big boat turning easily in the rather nar- 
row channel. The boat is about the size of those 
running between Charleston, W. Va., and Cincinnati 
or Pittsburg— 165 feet long, 35 feet wide, and draws 
2 1-2 feet, with a big stern wheel : — the Columbia 
River type rather than the Mississippi, such as run 
from Dawson down — sets rather high in the water 




I iSllliNCi t\Jil GRAYJ.IXG — \\ lllTJb] 
HORSE RAPIDS. 




MOONLIGHT ON LAKE LE BARGE. 



DOWN THE YUKON. 115 

and lower parts all enclosed. It has powerful ma- 
chinery fit for breasting the swift waters; a large, 
commodious dining salon; a ladies' parlor in the rear; 
a smoking-room for gentlemen forward; lighted with 
electricity, and all modern conveniences. She was 
built at White Horse, as were also ten of the sister 
boats run by the railway company. Six years ago 
no steamboat had traversed these waters. With the 
current we travel fourteen to twenty miles an hour, 
against the current only five ! The river winds 
among hills and flats, and mountains all fir-clad and 
yellowed with much golden aspen, turned by the 
nightly frosts. 

We came down through Fifty Mile River, which 
is the name given to the waters connecting Lake 
Taggish and Lake Lebarge. The moon hung full 
and low in the south, giving a light as white as upon 
the table-lands of Mexico, so clear is the atmosphere 
and free from atmospheric dust. We sat upon the 
upper deck until late in the night, watching the vary- 
ing panorama. From the window of my stateroom, 
lying in my berth, I looked an hour or more while 
we sailed through Lake Lebarge — five or six miles 
wide, thirty miles long — hemmed in by lofty, rounded, 
fir-clad limestone mountains, 4,000 or 5,000 feet in 
altitude — the full moon illuminating the quiet waters. 
Only the frequent mocking laugh of the loon echoed 
on the still night air— there seemed to be hosts of 
them. Once I heard the melancholy howling of a 
timber wolf among the shadows of a deep bay. From 



116 IN TO THE YUKON. 

Lake Lebarge we entered the swift and dangerous 
currents of Thirty Mile River. Here the boats usu- 
ally tie up till daylight, but with the full moon and 
our immense electric searchlight, the captain ven- 
tured to go down. Again I sat up watching the 
foaming waters behind us and how deftly we backed 
and swung round the many sharp bends: — high 
mountains quite shutting us in, the foaming waters 
white and black in the moonlight and shadow. At 
last, when the mountains seemed higher, blacker, 
more formidable than ever, we suddenly rounded 
a precipitous mass of limestone and granite and float- 
ed out into an immense pool, while away to the east 
seemingly joined us another river as large as our own, 
the Hootalinqua, fetching down the yet greater tides 
of Lake Teslin, and forming with the Thirty ]\Iile, 
the true Yukon— though the stream is mapped as the 
Lewes, until joined by the Pelly, many miles below. 
We have now been descending this great river 
all day long; as wide as the Ohio, but swifter and 
deeper and always dark blue water. The valley is 
wide like the Ohio; the bottom lands lying higher 
above the water and the country rising in successive 
benches till the horizon is bounded by rounded 
mountains eight or ten miles away. Mountains green 
with fir, golden yellow with the aspen and the birch, 
and red and scarlet with the lutestring herb and 
lichens of the higher slopes. A magnificent pano- 
rama, an immense and unknown land, not yet taken 
possession of by man! The soil of many of these 




A YUKON SUNSET. 




THE UPPER YUKON. 




A YUKON COAL MINE 




FIVE FINGERS RAPIDS ON THE YUKON. 



DOWN THE YUKON. 121 

bottoms is rich, and will yield wonderful crops when 
tilled. Some distant day, towns and villages will 
be here. We have seen many loons upon the river, 
and probably twenty or thirty golden eagles soaring 
high in mighty circles — more than I have seen in a 
single day before. We caught sight of a black fox 
in the twilight last evening, and surprised a red fox 
hunting muscle shells upon a river bar to-day. 

We have passed several steamers coming up the 
river and stopped twice to take on firewood and a 
few times to put off mail at the stations of the North- 
west Mounted Police. About four o'clock p. m. we 
safely passed through the dangerous rocky pass of 
the Five Fingers, where five basalt rocks of gigantic 
size tower 100 feet into the air and block the passage 
of the foaming waters. Just where we passed, the 
cliffs seemed almost to touch our gunwales, so near 
are they together. The banks are high slopes of sand 
and gravel, now and then striped by a white band 
of volcanic dust. The trees are small and stunted, 
but growing thicker together, so as scarcely to let a 
man pass between. We have seen two puny coal 
banks where is mined a dirty bituminous coal, but 
worth $30.00 to $40.00 per ton in Dawson. Better 
than a mine of gold ! 

We have just now run through the difficult pass- 
age known as Hell's Gates, where on one side a mass 
of cliff and on the other a shifting sand bar con- 
fine the waters to a swift and treacherous chute. 
So close to the rocks have we passed that one might 



122 IN TO THE YUKON. 

have clasped hands with a man upon them, yet for 
a mile we never touched their jagged sides. Clever 
steering by our Norwegian pilot! 

Now we are past the mouth of the great Pelly 
River, itself navigable for steamboats for some three 
hundred miles, as far as up to White Horse by the 
main stream, and are hove to at Fort Selkirk, an 
old Hudson Bay Company post. Here the mounted 
police maintain a considerable force. They are stand- 
ing on the bank, many of them in their red coats, 
together with a group of the Pelly Indians, a tribe 
of famous fur hunters. 

Passing safely through the treacherous Lewes Rap- 
ids above the mouth of the Pelly, we have swung out 
into the true Yukon, an immense river, wide as the 
Mississippi at St. Louis, many islands and sand bars. 
At high water the river must here be two miles 
wide. The moon hangs round and white in the south, 
not much above the horizon, and we shall slowly 
steam ahead all night. 

September 7, 1903. 
We are making a quick trip. We passed the 
mouth of the Stewart River in the early dawn. An- 
other great stream navigable for 200 miles. By the 
Pelly Valley or by the Stewart, and their feeding 
lakes, will some day enter the railroads from the val- 
ley of the Mackenzie, coming up from Edmonton 
and the southeast. There is supposed to be yet much 




COMING UP THK YUKON. 



DOWN THE YUKON. 126 

undiscovered gold on both of these streams, and fine 
grass land and black soil fit for root crops. 

The Yukon, the mighty Yukon, is surely now be- 
come a gigantic river, its deep blue waters carrying 
a tide as great as the St. Lawrence. We are making a 
record trip, Ogilvie by 11 a. m., and Dawson, sixty 
miles below, in three more hours! So the captain 
cheerily avers — the fuller current and deeper tide 
of waters carrying us the more swiftly. 

The mountains are lower, more rounded in outline, 
fir and golden aspen and now red-leaved birch forests 
covering them to their summits. The air is cold and 
keen. Ice at night, grey fogs at dawn, clear blue sky 
by the time the sun feebly warms at nine or ten o 'clock. 

We are reaching lands where the ground is frozen 
solid a few feet below the summer thaws, and the 
twilight still lingers till nine o'clock. They tell us 
the days are shortening, but it is hard to credit it, 
so long is yet the eventime. 

I shall mail this letter at Dawson and send you 
yet another before we go down the river to the Beh- 
ring Sea. 

To-day I saw the first gulls, white and brown, some 
ducks on wing, many ravens and but few eagles. We 
are having a great trip, worth all the time and effort 
to get here — on the brink of the Arctic north, and 
in one of the yet but half-explored regions of the 
earth. 



126 ' IN TO THE YUKON. 



EIGHTH LETTER. 

DAWSON AND THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 

Dawson, Yukon TeO, 191ry, "» 
Tliursday, September itroOrS. / 

We came in on Tuesday afternoon, the steamer 
"White Horse" having had an unusually good run. 
As we descended the river the stream grew larger, 
wider, with more water, and when we passed the 
White River the blue water there changed to a muddy 
white, discolored by the turgid, whitish tide of that 
stream. It must flow somewhere through beds of the 
white volcanic ash, that for so many miles marks 
the banks of the Yukon with its threadlike white 
line a foot or two below the surface soil. 

As we passed the swift water of Klondike shoals 
and rounded in toward the landing, our own hoarse 
whistle was replied to by several steamers lying at 
the various wharf boats. We were ahead of time; — 
our arrival was an event. 

The town lies well, upon a wide bottom, and now 
begins to climb the back hill to a secondary flat. It 
is laid off with wide streets, the chief of which are 
graveled and fairly kept. There are a few brick 
buildings, but most are of wood, here and there 
an old-time (six years old) log building appearing 
among the more modern ones built of sawed lum- 
ber — for logs are now too precious and too costly 
to squander. 




THE "SARAH" ARRIVING AT DAWSON, 1,600 MILES 
UP FROM ST. MICHAELS. 







wHtre PAS s arwKow 

"1 f"1 ' 












THE LEVEE, DAWSON. OUR STEADIER. 



THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 129 

The town has telephones and electric lights, which 
latter must pay finely when you realize that for 
nearly seven months darkness prevails over day. 
There are two morning daily, and one evening daily 
newspapers, with all Associated Press telegraphic 
news. I send you a copy of one of them. Two banks 
handle the gold, buying the miners' "dust" and 
doing a thriving business. 

There are half a dozen quite handsome churches, 
two hospitals, government buildings, the ''Governor's 
Palace," and a number of residences that would do 
credit to any town. There are two large sawmills 
near the mouth of the Klondike River, which is 
crossed by two fine bridges, one iron and one wood. 
Of foundries and machine shops there are many. 
The stores and shops are many of them pretentious 
and filled with the most expensive high-class goods 
and wares— for, in the first place, the gold miner is 
lavish, extravagant, and will only have the very best, 
while it costs as much freight to bring in a cheap 
commodity as an expensive one. You can buy as 
handsome things here as in San Francisco or New 
York, if you don't mind the price. The daily news- 
papers are sold by newsboys on the streets at 25 cents 
a copy. Fine steaks and roasts, mutton and veal, 
are thirty-five to sixty-five cents per pound. Chick- 
ens, $2.00 to $3.00 each. A glass of beer, twenty-five 

cents. 

Some elegant drags and victorias, with fine horses, 
as well as many superb draft horses, are seen on the 



130 IN TO THE YUKON. 

streets. It only pays to have the best horses; a scrub 
costs as much to bring in and to keep as a good one, 
and hay is $60.00 to $150.00 per ton, and oats are sold 
by the pound, sometimes $1.00 per pound. Cows* 
milk is an expensive luxury at the restaurants, and 
various canned goods form the staple of life. 

Many large steamboats ply on the Yukon, and 
those running down to St. Michael, 1,800 miles below, 
are of the finest Mississippi type, and are run by 
Mississippi captains and pilots. We shall go down 
on one of these, the ''Sarah,*' belonging to the 
'* Northern Commercial Company," one of the two 
great American trading companies. Also large tow- 
boats push huge freight barges up and down the 
river. 

Several six-horse stage lines run many times a 
day to the various mining camps up and adjacent to 
the Klondike Valley, which is itself now settled and 
worked for one hundred and fifty miles from Daw- 
son. Probably thirty to thirty-five thousand people 
are at work in these various diggings, and trade and 
spend in Dawson. Hence Dawson takes on metropoli- 
tan airs, and considers herself the new metropolis of 
the far north and Yukon Valley. 

Two things strike the eye on first walking about 
the town. The multitude of big, long-haired, wolf- 
like-looking dogs, loafing about, and the smallness 
of the neat dwelling-houses. The dogs play in the 
summer and work untiringly through the long seven 
months of winter — a *' dog's life" then means a vol- 





^^^^^^^^HHHHHHP 


|^^^^^^^^B___ 


^*^.:,V4fyllti%- - ■-' w 





l>A\VSON CITY, THE YUKON — LOOKING DOWN. 




DAWSON AND MOl TH OF KLONDIKE RIVEH, 
LOOKING UP. 



THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 133 

ume. Small houses are easier to warm than big ones, 
when fuel is scarce and wood $16, $20 and $50 per 
cord, and soft spruce wood at that! 

But Dawson has an air of prosperity about it. 
The men and women are well dressed, and have strong, 
keen faces. Many of them "mushed" across Chil- 
koot Pass in 1897, and have made their piles. And 
they are ready to stampede to any new gold field 
that may be discovered. 

It is said that there are 6,000 people here, stayers, 
and then there is a fluctuating horde of comers and 
goers, tenderfeet many of them. This year eleven 
millions of dust has come into Dawson from the 
neighboring diggings, and since 1897, they say, near 
a hundred millions have been found ! Many men and 
even women have made their millions and ''gone 
out." Others have spent as much, and are starting 
in anew, and the multitude all expect to have their 
piles within a year or two. A curious aggregation 
of people are here come together, and from all parts ! 
There are very many whom you must not question 
as to their past. German officers driven from their 
Fatherland, busted English bloods, many of these 
in the Northwest Mounted Police, and titled ne'er- 
do-wells depending upon the quarterly remittances 
from London, and Americans who had rather not 
meet other fellow countrymen ; — mortals who have 
failed to get on in other parts of this earth, and who 
have come to hide for awhile in these vast, solitary 
regions, strike it rich if possible and get another 



134 IN TO THE YUKON. 

start. And many of them do this very thing, hit upon 
new fortunes, and sometimes, steadied by former ad- 
versity, lead new, honorable careers; but most of 
the black sheep, if luck is kindly to them, only 
plunge the deeper and more recklessly into vice and 
dissipation. The town is full of splendid bar-rooms 
and gilded gambling-hells. Two hundred thousand 
a night has been lost and won in some of them. 

I drove past a large, fine-looking man, but pos- 
sessed of a weak, dissipated mouth, on Eldorado Creek 
yesterday. His claim has been one of the fabu- 
lously rich, a million or more out of a patch of 
gravel 1,000 feet by 250, and he has now drunk 
and gambled most of it away, divorced a nice wife 
''in the States outside," then married a notorious 
belle of nether Dawson, and will soon again be back 
to pick and pan and dogs. Another claim of like size 
on Bonanza Creek was pointed out to me where two 
brothers have taken out over a million and a quarter 
since 1897, and have been ruined by their luck. 
They have recklessly squandered every nugget of their 
sudden riches in drunkenness and with cards and 
wine and women to a degree that would put the 
ancient Californian days of '49 in the shade. On 
the other hand, there are such men as Lippy, who 
have made their millions, saved and invested them 
wisely, and are regarded as veritable pillars in their 
communities. Lippy has just given the splendid 
Y. M. C. A. building to Seattle, 




SECOND AVENTTE. DAWSON. 




DAWSON — VIEW DOWN THE YUKON. 




THE CECIIi — THE FIRST HOTEL IN DAWSON. 




A PllIVATE CARRIAGE, 1)AA\ SON. 



THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 139 

There is now much substantial wealth in Dawson 
and the Klondike. Most of the large operations are 
in the hands of Americans, especially of the American 
companies who have bought up the claims after the 
individual miner, who just worked it superficially and 
dug out the cream, has sold the skim milk. And even 
the major part of the original "stakers" seem to 
have been Americans. There are many good people 
in Dawson among these. Then, too, there is the body 
of Canadian officials who govern the territory of Yu- 
kon — political henchmen of Laurier and the Liberal 
party, many of them French Canadians. The gov- 
ernor himself and the chief of those officials live here, 
and their families form the inner circle of select 
society. Very anti-American they are said to be, 
and they do not mix much with the Americans who, 
of equal or superior social standing at home, here 
devote themselves to business and gold getting and 
let Canadian society and politics altogether alone. 
But while the alert American has been the first to 
stake, occupy and extract the wealth of the Klondike, 
and while by his energy and tireless perseverance he 
has made the Yukon Territory the greatest placer 
mining region of the world, yet this acquirement 
of vast wealth by Americans has not really been 
pleasing to the Canadians, nor to the government 
of Ottawa. So these governing gentlemen in Ottawa 
have put their heads together to discover how they, 
too, might profit, and especially profit, by the energy 
of the venturesome American. How themselves se- 



140 IN TO THE YUKON. 

cure the chestnuts after lie bad, at peril of life and 
fortune, securely pulled the same out of the fire — in 
this case, frightful frost and ice ! And they hit upon 
this plan : They resolved themselves into little groups, 
and the government then began granting extensive and 
exclusive blanket concessions to these groups. Just 
now a great row is on over some of these private con- 
cession grants. One man, Treadgold by name, turns 
up and discovers himself to be possessed of an exclu- 
sive blanket grant to all the water rights of the Klon- 
dike Valley and its affluent creeks, as well as the 
exclusive right to hold and work all gold-bearing land 
not already occupied, and also to hold and have every 
claim already staked, or worked, which for any rea- 
son may lapse to the crown either for non-payment 
of taxes or any other reason, thus shutting out the 
individual miner from ever staking a new claim 
within this region should he discover the gold, and 
from taking up any lapsed claim, and from re-titling 
his own claim, should he be careless and neglect to 
pay his annual taxes by the appointed day ! 

Another man, named Boyle, also appears with a 
similar concession covering the famous Bonanza and 
Eldorado Creeks, where land is valued by the inch, 
and millions beyond count have in these few years 
been dug out. Such flagrant and audacious jobbery 
as the creation and granting of these blanket conces- 
sions in the quiet of Ottawa, presents to the world, 
has probably never before been witnessed, unless it 
be among the inner circle of the entourage of the Rus- 




DOG CORRAL — THE FASTEST TEAM IN DAWSON. 




A POTATO PATCH AT DAWSON. 



THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 143 

sian Czar. These steals have been so bold and 
unabashed that this entire mining region has risen 
as a unit in angry protest. While the miner 
has been prospecting, discovering, freezing, digging 
in these Arctic solitudes, the snug, smug politician 
of Ottawa has fixed up a job to swipe the whole 
find should the innocent, ignorant prospector hap- 
pen to make one. So vigorous has been the protest 
against these daring abuses of a government clique, 
that this summer what is called a "Dominion Royal 
Commission" has been sent here to investigate the 
situation. The papers are full of the matter. The 
citizens have met in mass-meeting and unanimously 
joined in the protest against the concessions, calling 
for their revocation, and Judge — '^Justice" — Brittain, 
the head of the commission, is bitterly denounced as 
a partisan here simply on a whitewashing trip to ex- 
culpate Laurier and his friends. And the result of 
what has unquestionably been crooked jobbery at 
Ottawa is said to be that hundreds of prospectors 
and miners are moving out of the Yukon and into 
Alaska, where they say ''there is fair play," and a 
man may have what he finds. What I here tell you 
is the current talk in Dawson— quite unanimous talk 
— and I should like to have heard the other side, if 
there is one. 

To-day H and I have been across the river to 

visit a characteristic establishment of these far north- 
ern lands — a summer *'dog ranch" — a place where, 
during the summer months, the teams of "Huskies" 



144 IN TO THE YUKON. 

and ''Malamutes" may be boarded and cared for till 
the working-time of winter comes again. Here are 
some seventy-five dogs in large kennels of rough tim- 
ber, each team of six dogs having its own private 
kennel, with a large central yard inside the tiers of 
pens, into which the whole pack are turned once a 
day for exercise. We hoped to find the proprietor at 
home and induce him to give his pets a scamper in 
the central yard, but he was away. The only visitors 
besides ourselves were two strange dogs which stood 
outside, running up and down the line and arousing 
the entire seventy-five to one great chorus of barks 
and howls. Some of the groups of dogs were superb. 
And two teams of Malamutes— the true Esquimaux — 
must have been worth their weight in gold— six dogs 
—$1,000.00 at the very least. We tried to get some 
kodak shots, but a cloudy sky and pine log bars made 
the result doubtful. 

We have just returned from an evening at the first 
annual show of the Dawson or Yukon ''Horticultural 
Society." The name itself is a surprise; the display 
of vegetables particularly and flowers astonished me. 
The biggest beets I have ever seen, the meaty sub- 
stance all clear, solid, firm and juicy. Potatoes, Early 
Rose and other varieties, some new kinds raised from 
seed in three years — large, a pound or more in size. 
And such cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce as you 
never saw before ! Many kinds, full-headed and 
able to compete with any produced anywhere. All 
these raised in the open air on the rich, black bottom 






is 



2| 



5H 



H 



/4^ 



THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 147 

and bench land of the Yukon. Squashes and also 
tomatoes, but these latter, some of them, not fully 
ripened. Also a display of fine strawberries just now 
ripe. We bought strawberries in the markets of Cris- 
tiania and Stockholm upon the 12th and 13th of Sep- 
tember, last year, and now we find a superior ripe 
fruit here at just about the same degree of north 
latitude. The wild currants, blueberries and rasp- 
berries with which these northern latitudes abound are 
notorious. And the show of oats, rye, barley, wheat 
and timothy and native grasses, as well as of red and 
white clover, was notable, proving beyond a doubt 
that this Yukon region is capable of raising varied 
and nutritious crops necessary for man 's food and for 
the support of stock, horses and cattle. Already a 
good many thrifty mortals, instead of losing them- 
selves in the hunt for gold, are quietly going into the 
raising of vegetables and hay and grain, and get fab- 
ulous prices for what grows spontaneously almost in 
a night. And the show of flowers grown in the open 
air would have delighted you. All of these products 
of the soil have been grown in sixty or seventy days 
from the planting of the seed, the almost perpetual 
sunlight of the summer season forcing plant life to 
most astonishing growth. 

September 11th. 
Day before yesterday I took the six-horse stage 
up Bonanza Creek of the Klondike and rode some 
thirteen miles over the fine government road to ' ' Dis- 



148 IN TO THE YUKON. 

covery" claim, where a Cleveland (0.) company is 
using a dredge and paying the Indian '^Skookum 
Jim," whose house we saw at Caribou, a royalty that 
this year will place $90,000.00 to his credit, I am told. 
The Klondike is a large stream, about like Elk 
River of West Virginia, rising two hundred miles 
eastward in the Rockies, where the summer's melting 
snow gives it a large flow of water. The valley is broad 
— a mile or more. The hills are rolling and rounded, 
black soil, broad flats of small firs and birches. Bo- 
nanza Creek, on which Skookum Jim and ''Dawson 
Charlie" and the white man, discovered the first gold 
in 1897, has proved the richest placer mining patch 
of ground the world has ever known. For a length 
of some twenty miles it is occupied by the several 
claim-holders, who are working both in the creek bed 
and also ancient river beds high up on the rolling 
hill slopes, a thing never known before. Here the 
claims are larger than at Atlin, being 1,000 feet wide 
and 250 feet up and down the creek. The claim where 
a discovery is made is called "Discovery Claim," and 
the others are named "No. 1 above" and "No. 1 be- 
low," "No. 2 above" and "No. 2 below," etc., and 
so entered of record. I had seen the dredge being 
built on Gold Run at Atlin. I wished to see one 
working here. I found a young American named 
Elmer in charge, and he showed me everything. Then 
he insisted that I dine with him, and took me up to 
his snug cottage, where I was cordially greeted by 
his American wife, and taken to the mess tent, where 




DAtLY STAGE ON BONANZA. 




DISCOVERY CLAIM ON BONANZA OF 
THE KIjONDIKE. 



THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 151 

a Japanese cook set a good dinner before us. Then 
Mrs. Elmer said that if I would like she would be 
delighted to drive me still further up Bonanza, and 
up the equally famous Eldorado Fork, and show me 
the more noted claims. Her horse was a good one, 
and for nearly three hours we spanked along. At 
''16 Eldorado below" I saw the yawning gravel pit 
from which $1,200,000 has already been taken out by 
the lucky owner. From ''28 Eldorado above" I saw 
where the pay gravel yielded another enormous sum. 
And all along men were still digging, dumping, 
sluicing and getting gold. At "18 Bonanza above," 
yet another particularly rich strike was shown me, 
and at "28 Bonanza above, ' ' working in the mud and 
gravel, were men already enormously rich, who in 
1897 owned nothing but their outfit. And up along 
the hillsides, too, near the tops, were other gashes in 
the gravel soil where gold in equally fabulous sums 
has been taken out and is still being got, for all these 
rich sands are yet far from being worked out or ex- 
hausted. The first mad rush is over. Men do not now 
merely pick out the big nuggets, but are putting in 
improved machinery and saving the finer dust. Along 
the roadside we also saw many men digging and 
"rocking" for gold, who have leased a few square 
yards or an acre or two on a royalty and who are 
said to be "working a lay. ' ' After our drive, I caught 
the returning stage and came home in the long twi- 
light. 



152 IN TO THE YUKON. 

To-day I have staged again twenty miles on to 
the famous Hunker Creek, and then been driven fur- 
ther and home again by Mr, Orr, the owner of the 
stage line, behind a team of swift bays, over another 
fine government highway. I have looked at more 
machinery, steam shovels, hoist and labor-saving ap- 
paratus, and seen more millions already made and in 
the making. The present and potential wealth of this 
country almost stupifies one, and dollars fall into 
the insignificance of dimes. The traffic on these fine 
roads is also surprising. Substantial log *'road 
houses," or inns, every mile or so, and frequently at 
even shorter intervals, very many foot-farers travel- 
ing from place to place. Young men with strong, 
resolute faces; bicycle riders trundling a pack 
strapped to their handle-bars, and many six and 
eight span teams of big mules and big horses hauling 
immense loads — sometimes two great broad-tired wa- 
gons chained together in a train. Ten or twelve four 
and six horse stages leave Dawson every day, and as 
many come in, carrying passengers and mails to and 
from the many mining camps. In my stage to-day 
behind me sat two Mormons, a man and a woman, 
who had never met before, from Utah, and a woman 
from South Africa, the wife of an expatriated Boer; 
a Swede who was getting rich and a French Canadian. 
My host at dinner was from Montreal, a black-eyed, 
bulldog-jawed ''habitan," whose heart warmed to me 
when I told him that my great grandmother, too, was 
French from Quebec, and who thereupon walked me 




1.00KIAG LP TllK KLONDIKE KIVER. 




'MES ENFANTS" MALAMUTE PUPS. 




A KLONDIKE CABIN, 



THE GOLDEN KLONDIKE. 157 

out to the barn to see his eleven Malamute pups, and 
afterward insisted that I take a free drink at his bar. 
I took a kodak of him with '^mes e^ifants/^ and prom- 
ised to send him a copy of the same. 

To-night I ventured out to try again the restaurant 
of our first adventure. Sitting at a little table, I 
was soon joined by three bright-looking men — one a 
"barrister," one a mining engineer, one a reporter. 
Result (1), an interview; (2), a pass to the fair; (3), 
my dinner paid for, a 50-cent Havana cigar thrust 
upon me, and (4) myself carried off to the said fair 
by two of its directors, and again shown its fine dis- 
play of fruits and grains and flowers and all its 
special attractions by the management itself. In fact, 
the Dawsonite can not do too much for the stranger 
sojourning in his midst. 

Mercury 26 to 28 degrees every morning. 



158 IN TO THE YUKON. 



NINTH LETTER. 

MEN OF THE KLONDIKE, 

Yukon Territory, Canada, September 18, 1903. 

"We lingered in Dawson a week waiting for the 
steamers ''Sarah" or "Louise" or "Cudahy" to come 
up from the lower river, and though always "com- 
ing, ' ' they never came. Meantime the days had begun 
to visibly shorten, the frosts left thicker rime on roof 
and road each morning. ' ' Three weeks till the freeze- 
up," men said, and we concluded that so late was now 
the season that we had best not chance a winter on a 
sand-bar in the wide and shallow lower Yukon, and 
a nasty time with fogs and floe ice in Behring Sea. 
So on Wednesday, the 16th, we again took the fine 
steamer "White Horse," and are now two days up the 
river on our way. We will reach White Horse Sun- 
day morning, stay there till Monday morning, when 
we will take the little railway to Skagway, then the 
ocean coaster to Seattle and the land of dimes and 
nickels. We regret not having been able to go down 
to St. Michael and Nome, and to see the whole great 
Yukon. My heart was quite set on it, and the ex- 
pense was about the same as the route we now take, 
but to do so we should have had to take too great 
risks at this late season. 

While lingering in Dawson we were able to see 
more of the interests of the community. One day we 



MEN OF THE KLONDIKE. 159 

called on a quite notable figure, a, or rather tlie, Dr. 
Grant of St. Andrews Hospital, M. D., and of St. 
Andrews great church, D. D. ! A Canadian Scotch- 
man of, say, thirty-five years, who, although a man of 
independent fortune, chose the wild life of the border 
just from the very joy of buffet and conquest. He 
''mushed" it in 1897 over the Chilkoot Pass. He 
built little churches and hospitals all in one, and be- 
came the helper of thousands whom the perils and 
stresses of the great trek quite overcame. So now he 
is a power in Dawson. A large and perfectly equipped 
hospital, his creation, has been endowed by the gov- 
ernment ; a fine, modern church holding six hundred ; 
a pretty manse and big mission school buildings of 
logs. All these standing in a green turfed enclosure 
of two or three acres. The church cost $60,000. He 
preaches Sundays to a packed house. He is chief sur- 
geon of the hospital during the rest of the time. He 
gives away his salary, and the men of these min- 
ing camps, who know a real man when they see him, 
can't respond too liberally to the call of the preacher- 
surgeon who generally saves their bodies and some- 
times their souls. I found him a most interesting 
man— a naturalist, a scientific man, a man of the 
world and who independently expounds a Presbyte- 
rian cult rather of the Lyman Abbott type. He 
showed us all through the hospitals; many surgical 
accident cases; very few fevers or sickness. The 
church, too, we inspected; all fittings within modern 
and up to date; a fine organ, the freight on Avhich 



160 IN TO THE YUKON. 

alone was $5,000, 40 per cent, of its cost; a fur- 
nace that warmed the building even at 80 below 
zero, and a congregation of 400 to 500 people, better 
dressed (the night we attended) than would be a simi- 
lar number in New York. There are no old clothes 
among the well-to-do; gold buys the latest styles and 
disdains the cost. There are few old clothes among 
the poor, for the poor are very few. So as I looked 
upon the congregation before Dr. Grant, I might as 
well have been in New York but for a pew full of red 
coats of ''N. W. M. P." (North West Mounted Po- 
lice). 

The succeeding day Dr. Grant called upon us, and 
escorted us through the military establishment that 
polices and also governs the Yukon territory as well 
as the whole Canadian Northwest. Barracks for 250 
men, storerooms, armory, horse barn, dog kennel — 150 
dogs — jail, mad-house and courtrooms. The execu- 
tive and judicial departments all under one hand and 
even the civil rule as well. Everywhere evidence of 
the cold and protection against it. A whole room full 
of splendid fur coats, parquets, with great fur hoods. 
Such garments as even an Esquimaux would rejoice in. 

Later, we attended the fine public school, where are 
over 250 children in attendance; all equipment the 
latest and up to date ; kindergarten department and 
grades to the top, the teachers carefully picked from 
eastern Canada. The positions are much sought for 
by reason of unusually high salaries paid. The new 
principal had just come from Toronto. He told us 



MEN OF THE KLONDIKE. 161 

that these were the brightest, most alert children he 
had ever taught. Keen faces, good chins, inheriting 
the aggressive initiative of the parents who had dared 
to come so far. In the kindergarten a little colored 
boy sat among his white mates. In Canada, like Mex- 
ico, there is no color line. 

It now takes us four days to creep up the river 
against the strong current and through the many 
shallows to White Horse. On the boat there are all 
sorts. I have met a number of quaint figures. One 
a French Canadian trapper, on his way to a winter 
camp on McMillion Creek of the Pelly River. He will 
have three or more cabins along a route where he will 
set his traps. About two hundred he keeps a-going, 
and sees as many of them as he can each day. Mink 
and marten and otter and beaver, as well as wolves 
and foxes, lynx and bears. For meat he prefers 
caribou to moose. For many years he trapped for 
the "H. B. C." (Hudson Bay Company) over east of 
the Rockies. But they paid him almost nothing and 
there were no other buyers. Now he sells to Dawson 
merchants and gets $6.00 for a marten skin ''all 
through" — the whole lot. The fur merchant in Vic- 
toria asked $30.00 for just such, and said we might 
buy them as low as $10.00 in the Yukon country, so 
he had heard. Another man to-day has sat on the 
wood-pile with me and told me of the great North— 
a man with a well-shaped face, who used language of 
the educated sort, yet dressed in the roughest canvas, 
and who is raising hay here along the Yukon which 



162 IN TO THE YUKON. 

he ^' sells at three cents a pound in Dawson, or one 
cent a pound in the stock," wild, native hay at that. 
And he had ''mushed" and "voyaged" all through 
the far north. He had set out from Edmonton, he 
and his ''pardner," and driven to "Athabasca land- 
ing" in their farm wagon, three or four hun- 
dred miles over the "Government road;" had passed 
through the beautiful, wide, gently sloping valley of 
the Peace River, and through the well-timbered re- 
gions north of the Peace. At Athabasca landing they 
had sold the wagon and built a stout flatboat, and in 
this had floated down some three hundred miles to 
Athabasca Lake, Indian pilots having taken them 
through the more dangerous rapids. The Athabasca 
River enters the lake among swamps and low, willowy 
spits of land, where grows wild hay and ducks abound, 
and the "Great Slave" River flows out of it into the 
body of water of that name. These two rivers enter 
and depart near together, and the voyager escapes 
the dangers of a journey on the great and shallow 
Athabasca, where the surf is most dangerous. Three 
or four hundred miles of a yet greater river, with 
many rapids through which you are guided by 
Indian pilots, who live near the dangerous waters, 
carry you into the Great Slave Lake, the largest 
body of fresh water in Canada. Steamboats of the 
Hudson Bay Company run upon it and ply upon 
the inflowing rivers, and even go up and down 
the McKenzie to Herschell Island at its mouth, 
and where the "N. W. M. P." have a post, chiefly 





ON THE YUKON. 




FLOATING DOWN THE YUKON. 



MEN OF THE KLONDIKE. 165 

to protect the natives from the whalers who gather 
there to trade and smuggle in dutiable goods. 
The McKenzie is greater than the Yukon, is wider 
and much deeper and carries a much greater volume 
of water. Great Slave Lake, while shallow and flat 
toward the eastern end, is deep and bounded by great 
cliffs and rocks on the west. Storms rage upon it, and 
at all times the voyagers count it dangerous water. 
Both it and Athabasca are full of fish, so, too, the 
adjacent rivers and the McKenzie. Floating down 
the McKenzie, passing the mouth of the Nelson River, 
they came at last to the Liard, and up this they canoed 
to within half a mile of the waters of the Pelly, down 
which they floated to the Yukon. The French trapper 
had also "come in" by this route. *'Two seasons it 
takes," he said, ''an easy trip," and you can winter 
quite comfortably in the mountains. East of the 
mountains there is much big game, ''plenta big 
game;" musk ox are there, and moose and caribou. 
But the Indians and wolves kill too many of them. 
The Indians catch the caribou on the ice and kill them 
for their tongues. ''Smoked caribou tongue mighta 
nice." They leave the carcasses where they fall, and 
then come the foxes for the feast. ' ' Thousands of fox, 
red fox, silver fox, black fox, Avhite fox. Mr. Fox he 
eat caribou, he forget Indian — Indian set the trap and 
fox he caught. The wolf, too, he creep up upon the 
caribou, even upon the moose when he alone, when 
he lying down; the wolf he bites the hamstring. He 
kill many moose. That a grand country for to trap, 



166 IN TO THE YUKON. 

but the Hudson Bay Company it pay nothing for the 
fur. A sack of flour I see them give one Indian for a 
black fox. Now since Hudson Bay lose his exclusive 
right, no man trade with him or sell him fur except 
he must for food." 

We have just passed a little log cabin beneath great 
firs and amidst a cluster of golden aspen. Its door 
and solitary window are wide open. No one occupies 
it, or ever will. Wild things may live in it, but not 
man. Near the cabin, where the Yukon makes a great 
sweeping bend, and the swift water purls round into 
bubbling eddies, a narrow trail cut from the river 
bank leads up among the trees. The dweller in the 
cabin could see far up the great river ; he could espy 
the raft or skiff or barge descending and mark its 
occupants; then he used to take his trusty rifle, step 
across to the opening in the trees at the point, and 
pick off his victims. Sometimes their bodies fell into 
the deep, cold, swift-running waters. The wolves and 
foxes picked their bones on the bars below. Some- 
times he captured the body as well as the outfit, and 
sunk and buried them at leisure. The pictures of the 
three last men he murdered hang in the office of the 
chief of the Northwest Mounted Police, at Dawson, 
beside his own. It took three years to gather the com- 
plete chain of circumstantial evidence, but at last they 
hanged him, two years ago. In the beginning there 
were many other crimes quite as atrocious committed 
in this vast region of the unknown north, but soon 
the efficiency and systematic vigilance of the North- 



MEN OF THE KLONDIKE. 167 

west Mounted Police broke up forever the bandits and 
thugs who had crowded in here from all the earth, 
and Uncle Sam's dominion in particular. Many were 
hanged, many sent up for long terms, many run 
out. Life sentences were common for robbery. To- 
day the Yukon country is more free from crime than 
West Virginia, and Dawson more orderly than 
Charleston. 



168 IN TO THE YUKON. 



TENTH LETTER. 

DOG LORE OF THE NORTH. 
White Horse, Sunday, September 20, 1903. 
We arrived about nine o'clock this morning. The 
voyage up the Yukon from Dawson has taken us since 
Wednesday at 2 :30, when we cast off and stemmed 
the swift waters — twenty-four hours longer than going 
down. During the week of our stay at Dawson the 
days grew perceptibly shorter and the nights colder. 
There is no autumn in this land. Two weeks ago the 
foliage had just begun to turn; a week ago the 
aspens and birches were showing a golden yellow, but 
the willows and alders were yet green. Now every 
leaf is saffron and golden — gamboge — and red. In a 
week or more they will have mostly fallen. As yet the 
waters of the Yukon and affluent rivers show no ice. 
In three weeks they are expected to be frozen stiff, 
and so remain until the ice goes out next June. The 
seasons of this land are said to be ''Winter and June, 
July and August. ' ' To me it seems inconceivable that 
the Arctic frosts should descend so precipitately. But 
on every hand there is evident preparation for the 
cold, the profound cold. Double windows and doors 
are being fastened on. Immense piles of sawed and 
cut firewood are being stored close at hand. Sleighs 
and especially sledges are being painted and put in 




WITH AND WITHOUT. 



DOG LORE OF THE NORTH. 171 

order; the dogs which have run wild, and mostly for- 
aged for themselves during the summer, are being dis- 
covered, captured and led off by strings and straps 
and wires about their necks. Men are buying new 
dogs, and the holiday of dogkind is evidently close at 
an end. Women are already wearing some of their 
furs. Ice half to a full inch forms every night, and 
yesterday we passed through our first snow storm, and 
all the mountains round about, and even the higher 
hills, are to-day glistening in mantles of new, fresh, 
soft-looking snow. The steamers of the White Pass 
and Yukon Railway Company will be laid up in three 
weeks now, they tell us, and already the sleighs and 
teams for the overland stage route are being gathered, 
the stage houses at twenty-four-mile intervals being 
set in order, and the ''Government road" being pre- 
pared afresh for the transmission of mails and pas- 
sengers. 

We have just seen some of the magnificent Lab- 
rador dogs, with their keeper, passing along the street, 
owned by the Government post here — immense ani- 
mals, as big as big calves, heifers, yearlings, I might 
say. They take the mails to outlying posts and even 
to Dawson when too cold for the horses — horses are 
not driven when the thermometer is more than 40 
degrees below ! 

As I sat in the forward cabin the other night 
watching the motley crowd we were taking "out," 
two bright young fellows, who turned out to be " Gov- 
ernment dog-drivers" going to the post here to report 



172 IN TO THE YUKON. 

for winter duty, fell into animated discussion of their 
business, and told me much dog lore. The big, well- 
furred, long-legged '^Labrador Huskies" are the 
most powerful as well as fiercest. A load of 150 
pounds per dog is the usual burden, and seven to nine 
dogs attached each by a separate trace — the Lab- 
rador harness is used with them, so the dogs spread 
out fan-shaped from the sledge and do not interfere 
with each other. The great care of the driver is to 
maintain discipline, keep the dogs from shirking, 
from tangling up, and from attacking himself or each 
other. He carries a club and a seal-hide whip, and 
uses each unmercifully. If they think you afraid, 
the dogs will attack you instantly, and would easily 
kill you. And they incessantly attack each other, and 
the whole pack will always pounce on the under dog 
so as to surely be in at a killing, just for the fun of 
it, ripping up the unfortunate and lapping his blood 
eagerly, though they rarely eat him. And as these 
dogs are worth anywhere from $100 up, the driver 
has much ado to prevent the self-destruction of his 
team. And to club them till you stun them is the 
only way to stop their quarrels. Then, too, the dogs 
are clever and delight to spill the driver and gallop 
away from him, when he can rarely catch them until 
they draw up at the next post house, and it may be 
ten or twelve or thirty miles to that, unless it be that 
they get tangled among the trees or brush, when the 
driver will find them fast asleep, curled up in the 
snow, where each burrows out a cozy bed. The Mala- 



DOG LORE OF THE NORTH. 173 

mutes, or native Indian dog, usually half wolf, are 
driven and harnessed differently — all in a line — and 
one before the other. They are shorter haired, faster, 
and infinitely meaner than the long-haired Huskie 
(of which sort the Labrador dogs are). Their de- 
light is to get into a fight and become tangled, and 
the only way out is to club them into insensibility, 
and cut the leather harness, or they will cut the seal- 
hide thongs themselves at a single bite if they are 
quite sure your long plaited whip will not crack them 
before they can do it. These Malamutes are the 
usual dogs driven in this country, for few there are 
to afford or know how to handle the more powerful 
Labrador Huskie. And the Malamute is the king of 
all thieves. He will pull the leather boots off your 
feet while you sleep and eat them for a midnight 
supper; he delights to eat up his seal-hide harness; 
he has learned to open a wooden box and will devour 
canned food, opening any tin can made, with his 
sharp fangs, quicker than a steel can-opener. Canned 
tomatoes, fruit, vegetables, sardines, anything that 
man may put in, he will deftly take out. Even the 
tarpaulins and leather coverings of the goods he may 
be pulling, he will rip to pieces, and he will devour 
the load unless watched with incessant vigilance night 
and day. Yet, with all their wolfish greed and man- 
ners, these dogs perform astonishing feats of endur- 
ance, and never in all their lives receive a kindly 
word. **If you treat them kindly, they think you 
are afraid, and will at once attack you," the driver 



174 IN TO THE YUKON. 

said ; ' ' the only way to govern them is through fear. ' * 
Once a day only are they fed on raw fish, and while 
the Malamute prefers to pilfer and steal around the 
camp, the Huskie will go and fish for himself when 
off duty, if given the chance. Just like the bears and 
lynx of the salmon-running streams, he will stand 
along the shore and seize the fish that is shoved too 
far upon the shallows. Seventy miles a day is the 
rule with the Indians and their dog teams, and the 
white man does almost as much. Forty miles is it 
from here to Caribou Crossing, and the Northwest 
Mounted Police, with their Labrador teams, take 
the mails when the trains are snowbound and cover 
the distance in four to five hours. Great going this 
must be ! 

And then the conversation turned to the great 
cold of this far north land, when during the long 
nights the sun only shows for an hour or two above 
the horizon. 

When the thermometer falls below fifty degrees 
(Fahr.), then are the horses put away, what few 
there may be, and the dogs transport the freight and 
mails along the Government road between White 
Horse and Dawson, as well as from Dawson to the 
mining camps to which the stage lines usually run. 
Indeed, throughout all of this north land, with the 
coming of the snow, the dogs are harnessed to the 
sledges and become the constant traveling compan- 
ions of man. 




MAIiAMlTE TEAM OF U. S. 3IAIL-CAKKIER- 
DAAVSON. 




BKEAKING OF THE YLKON — MAY J 7, Ji>0:J 
1 




SUN DOGS. 




WINTER LANDSCAPE. 



DOG LORE OP THE NORTH. 179 

The air is dry in all this great interior basin of 
the continent, and, consequently, the great cold is 
not so keenly felt as in the damper airs nearer to 
the sea. The dogs can travel in all weathers which 
man can stand, and even when it becomes so cold 
that men dare not move. The lowest Government 
record of the thermometer yet obtained at Dawson 
City is eighty-three degrees below zero. These great 
falls of temperature only occasionally occur, but 
when the thermometer comes down to minus sixty 
degrees, then men stay fast indoors, and only ven- 
ture out as the necessity demands; then the usually 
clear atmosphere becomes filled with a misty fog, 
often so thick that it is difficult to see a hundred 
yards away. 

When traveling with a dog team, or, indeed, when 
** mushing" upon snow-shoes across streams and for- 
ests, men go rather lightly clad, discarding furs, and 
ordinarily wearing only thick clothes, with the long 
canvas parquet as protection against the wind rather 
then against the temperature; then motion becomes 
a necessity, and to tarry means to freeze. The dan- 
ger of the traveler going by himself is that the 
frost may affect his eyesight, freezing the eyelids 
together, perhaps dazing his sight, unless snow- 
glasses are worn. And the ice forms in the nostrils 
so rapidly, as well as about the mouth, and upon the 
mustache and beard, that it is a constant effort to 
keep the face free from accumulating ice. In small 
parties, however, men travel long distances, watch- 



180 IN TO THE YUKON. 

ing each other as well as themselves to insure escape 
from the ravages of the frost. When the journey is 
long and the toil has become severe, the Arctic drow- 
siness is another of the enemies which must be pre- 
vented from overcoming the traveler, and the meth- 
ods are often cruel which friends must exercise in 
order to prevent their companions from falling 
asleep. 

During this long period of Arctic winter and Arc- 
tic night, there seems to be no great cessation in 
the struggle for gold; the digging in the Klondike 
and remoter regions retain their companies of men 
toiling to find the gold. The frozen gravels are 
blasted out and piled up to be thawed the next sum- 
mer by the heat of the sun and washed with the 
flowing waters. 

While the Arctic night prevails for twenty-two or 
twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, yet so 
brilliant are the stars and so refulgent are the heav- 
ens with the lightening of the aurora borealis, that 
men work and travel and carry on the usual occu- 
pations, little hindered by the absence of the sun. 
Sometimes, in the very coldest days, is beheld the 
curious phenomenon of several suns appearing above 
the horizon, and these are called the "sun dogs," 
the sun itself being seemingly surrounded by lesser 
ones. I was fortunate enough to obtain a fine pho- 
tograph taken on one of these days, which I am able 
to send you. 



DOG LORE OP THE NORTH. 181 

The freezing of the Yukon comes on very sud- 
denly, the great river often becoming solid in a night. 
The curious thing of these northern lakes and rivers 
is, that the ice forms first upon the bottom, and, ris- 
ing, fills the water with floating masses and ice par- 
ticles, which then become congealed almost immedi- 
ately. 

Early in last October our steamer ''White Horse," 
on which we are now traveling, became permanently 
frozen in when within one hundred miles of DaAvson 
City, the apparently clear river freezing so quickly 
that the boat becamle fast for the winter, and the 
passengers were compelled to "mush" their way, as 
best they might, across the yet snowless country, a 
terrible and trying experience in the gathering cold. 

You may be in a row-boat or a canoe upon ice- 
free waters, and, as you paddle, you may notice 
bubbles and particles of ice coming to the surface. 
Great, then, is the danger. The bottom has begun to 
freeze. You may be frozen in before you reach the 
shore in ice yet too thin to walk upon or permit 
escape. 

For the greater part of the winter season the 
frozen streams become the natural highway of the 
traveler, and the dog teams usually prefer the snow- 
covered ice rather than attempt to go over the 
rougher surface of the land. 

Another curious thing, friends tell me, affects 
them in this winter night-time, and that is the dis- 
position of men to hibernate. Fifteen and sixteen 



182 IN TO THE YUKON. 

hours of sleep are coiTLmonly required, while in the 
nightless summer-time three and four and five hours 
satisfy all the demands nature seems to make — thus 
the long sleeps of winter compensate for the lack of 
rest taken during the summer-time. 

And yet these hardy men of the north tell me that 
they enjoy the winter, and that they perform their 
toils with deliberation and ease, and take full advant- 
age of the long sleeping periods. 

The Yukon freezes up about the 10th of October, 
the snow shortly follows, and there is no melting of 
the ice until early June. This year the ice went out 
from the river at Dawson upon June 10th; thus, 
there are seven to eight months of snow and ice- 
bound winter in this Arctic land. 



HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD. 188 



ELEVENTH LETTER. 

HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD. 

Steamer Dolphin, September 22, 1903. 
We left White Horse by the little narrow-gauge 
railway, White Pass & Yukon Railway, at 9 :30 — tv/o 
passenger cars, one smoker, mail and express and 
baggage hung on behind a dozen freight cars. Our 
steamer brought up about one hundred passengers 
from Dawson and down-river points, and together with 
what got on board at White Horse, the train was 
packed. Many red-coated Northwest Mounted Po- 
lice also boarded the train, and just as it pulled out, 
a strapping big, strong-chinned, muscular woman 
came in the rear door and sat down. She was ele- 
gantly gowned, dark, heavy serge, white shirt waist, 
embroidered cloth jacket, and much gold jewelry, high 
plumed hat. Presently a big man called out that all 
the men must go forward into the next car, and the 
big woman announced that she would proceed to 
examine all the ladies for gold dust. The maternal 
government of the Yukon Territory exacts a tax of 
21/2 per cent, of all gold found, and examines all 
persons going out of the territory, and confiscates all 
dust found on the person. Women are said to be 
the most inveterate smugglers, and the big woman 
g^oes through them most unmercifully. She bade the 
lady next her to stand up and then proceeded to feel 



184 IN TO THE YUKON. 

of her from stockings to chemise top, and did the 
same by the others. Those who wore corsets had a 
tough time, and some had to undo their hair. As 
the first victim stood up and was unbuttoned and 
felt over, she was greeted with an audible smile by 
the other ladies, but silence fell as the next victim 
was taken in hand. Meanwhile, during this pleasant 
diversion, a big red-coat stood with his back to each 
door, and the men were being similarly though not 
so ruthlessly gone through in the other cars. This 
trip no dust was found, I believe, but last week one 
woman was relieved of $1,800 sewed into the margin 
of her skirts and tucked deep into the recesses of her 
bosom. Stockings and bosom are the two chief femi- 
nine caches for gold, and when a culprit is thus dis- 
covered and relieved, many are the protestations and 
unavailing clamors raised. During the past year I 
am told that the examiners have seized in these 
searches some $60,000 in dust, so I persume the 
happy custom will for some time continue. Detec- 
tives are kept in Dawson, travel on the boats, and 
so watch and scrutinize every traveler that by the 
time the final round-up and search takes place, the 
probable smugglers are all pretty well spotted. As 
each is examined, his or her name is checked off in a 
little book. 

We were close to Caribou Crossing when the cere- 
mony was over, and I with others of my sex were 
permitted to re-enter the rear car and rejoin the 
company of the much beflustered ladies. 




LAIvJi; BKNMj]lT. 




THE HEIGHT OF LAND, WHITE PASS. 



HOW THE GOVERNMENT SEARCHES FOR GOLD. 187 

All along the advance of winter was apparent. 
The green of a fortnight ago had turned into the 
universal golden yellow, and the fresh snow lay in 
more extended covering upon all the mountain sum- 
mits and even far down their slopes. So it is in 
this far north, each day the snow creeps down and 
down until it has caught and covered all the valleys 
as well as hills. 

At Caribou we met old Bishop Bumpus and his 
good little wife, who, with a big cane, came all the 
way into the car to see us and say good-by. A charm- 
ing couple who have given their lives doing a noble 
work. 

Lake Bennett was like a mirror, and Lake Linde- 
mann above it, too, seemed all the greener in con- 
trast to the encroaching snows. We were at the 
White Pass Summit by 3 p. m., and then for an hour 
came down the 3,200 feet of four per cent, grade, the 
twenty miles to Skagway. The increase of snows on 
all the mountains seemed to bring out more saliently 
than ever the sharp, jagged granite rock masses. It 
even seemed to us that we were traversing a wilder, 
bolder, harsher land than when three weeks ago we 
entered it. And the views and vistas down into the 
warmer valleys we were plunging into were at times 
magnificent. Snow around and above us, increasing 
greenness of foliage below us, and beyond recurring 
glimpses of the Lynn fiord, with Skagway nestling 
at its head. In every affluent valley a glacier and a 
roaring torrent. 



188 IN TO THE YUKON. 

One of the newest and best boats in the trade, 
**The Dolphin,'* was awaiting us. Our stateroom 
was already wired for and secured. We took our 
last Alaska meal at the "Pack Train Restaurant," 
where we snacked sumptuously on roast beef, baked 
potatoes and coffee for seventy cents (in Dawson it 
would have been an easy $3.00), and walked 
down the mile-long pier to the boat. The tides are 
some twenty feet here, and the sandy J^ars of Skag- 
way require long piers to permit the ships to land 
when the tides are out. 

We cast off about 10 p. m., with the tide almost at 
its height, and only awoke to-day just as we were 
steaming out of Juneau. Now we are approaching 
the beautiful and dangerous Wrangel Narrows, and 
see everywhere above us the fresh snows of the fort- 
night's making. 

WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 

Wednesday, September 33rd. 
It is the middle of the afternoon and we are just 
safely through the — to-day — tempestuous passage 
of ''Dixon's Entrance," the thirty-three-mile break 
in the coast's protecting chain of islands and the 
outlet for Port Simpson to the open sea. Yesterday 
we passed through the dangerous twenty miles of the 
Wrangel Narrows just before dark, and only the 
swift swirls of the fighting tides endangered us ; they 
fall and rise seventeen feet in a few hours, and the 
waters entering the tortuous channels from each end 



WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 189 

meet in eddying struggle somewhere near the upper 
end. The boats try and pass through just before the 
flood tide or a little after it, or else tie up and wait 
for the high w^ater. If we had been an hour later, we 
should have had to lie by for fifteen hours, the cap- 
tain said. As we turned in from Frederick Sound, 
between two low-lying islands all densely wooded 
with impenetrable forests of fir, the waters were run- 
ning out against us almost in fury, but in a mile or 
two they were flowing with us just as swiftly. 

To-day we saw a good many ducks, chiefly mallard 
and teal, and small divers, and my first cormorant, 
black, long-necked and circling near us with much 
swifter flight than the gull. In. the narrows we 
started a great blue heron and one or two smaller 
bitterns. 

From the narrows we passed into Sumner Strait, 
and then turning to the right and avoiding Wrangel 
Bay and Fort Wrangel, where we stopped going up, 
passed into the great Clarence Strait that leads up 
direct from the sea. A sound or fiord one hundred 
miles or more long, ten or fifteen miles wide. 

The day had been clear, but, before passing 
through the narrows, clouds had gathered, and a sort 
of fierce Scotch mist had blown our rain-coats wet. 
On coming out into wider waters, the storm had be- 
come a gale. The wildest night we have had since 
twelve months ago in the tempest of the year upon 
the Gulf of Finland. To-day, until now, the waters 
have been too boisterous to write. All down Clarence 



190 IN TO THE YUKON. 

Strait, until we turned into Revilla and Oigedo Chan- 
nels — named for and by the Spanish discoverers — 
and across the thirty-three miles of Dixon's En- 
trance, we have shuttlecocked about at the mercy of 
the gale and in the teeth of the running sea. The 
guests at table have been few, but now we are snug 
behind Porcher Island and passing into the smooth 
waters of Greenville Channel, so I am able to write 
again. The Swedish captain says the storm is our 
equinoctial, and that may be, and. now that the sun 
is out and the blue sky appearing, we shall soon forget 
the stress, although to-night, as we pass from Fitz- 
hugh Sound into Queen Charlotte Sound, we shall 
have a taste of the Pacific swell again, and probably 
yet have some thick weather in the Gulf of Georgia. 
Considering the lateness of the season, we are, all in 
all, satisfied that we rightly gave up the St. Michaels 
trip, though it has sorely disappointed us not to have 
seen the entire two thousand miles of the mighty 
Yukon. 

Already we notice the moderation of the tempera- 
ture and the greater altitude of the sun, for we are 
quite one thousand miles south of Dawson, while the 
air has lost its quickening, exhilarating, tonic quality. 

We are becoming right well acquainted with our 
sundry shipmates, particularly those who have ''come 
out" from the Yukon with us. Among them we have 
found out another interesting man. Across the table 
from us on the steamer ''White Horse" sat a shock- 
headed man of about thirty years, tall, very tall, but 



WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 191 

muscularly built, and a strong, square jaw and firm, 
blue eyes. A fellow to have his own way ; a bad man 
in a mix-up. A flannel shirt, no collar, rough clothes. 
Possibly a gentleman, perhaps a boss tough. We find 
him a graduate of the University of Michigan. Ho 
has lived in Mexico, and now for five straight years 
has been '' mushing it," and prospecting in the far 
north; has tramped almost to the Arctic Sea, into the 
water-shed of the Mackenzie, and bossed fifty to one 
hundred men at the Klondike and Dominion diggings. 
His camera has always been his companion, and for 
an hour yesterday he sat in our cabin and read to 
us from the MSS. some of the verse and poems with 
which his valise is stacked. Some of the things are 
charming and some will bring the tears. This far 
north land of gold and frost has as yet sent out no 
poet to depict its hopes, its perils, its \\T:'ecks. It may 
be that he is the man. His name is Luther F. Camp- 
bell, and you may watch for the name. And so we 
meet all sorts. 

Friday, September 25th. 
Yesterday was a ''nasty" day, as was the day 
before. Early, 2 or 3 a. m., we passed through the 
ugly waters of Millbank Sound, where the sweeping 
surge of the foam-capped Pacific smashes full force 
against the rock-bound coast. We were tossed about 
greatly in our little 400-ton boat, until at last, pass- 
ing a projecting headland, we were instantly in dead 
quiet water and behind islands once more. About 



192 IN TO THE YUKON. 

10 A. M. we came again into the angry Pacific, and 
for fifty miles — four hours — were tossed upon the 
heavy sea, Queen Charlotte Sound. The equinoctial 
gales have had a wild time on the Pacific, and the 
gigantic swell of that ocean buffeted our little boat 
about like a toy. But she is a fine "sea boat," and 
sat trim as a duck, rolling but little, nor taking much 
water. Toward middle afternoon we were in quiet 
waters again, and by nightfall at the dangerous Sey- 
mour Narrows, where Vancouver Island leans up 
against the continent, or has cracked off from it, and 
a very narrow channel separates the two. Here the 
tides — twelve feet — rise, rush and eddy, meet and 
whirl, and only at flood stage do boats try to pass 
through. 

In 1875, a U. S. man-of-war tried to pass through 
when the tides were low, and, caught in the swirling 
maelstrom, sank in one hundred fathoms of water. 
In 1883, a coastwise steamer ventured at improper 
moment to make the passage, was caught in the mad 
currents, and was engulfed with nearly all on board ; 
half a dozen men alone were saved. Hence the cap- 
tains are now very careful in making the passage, 
and so we lay at anchor — or lay to — from seven to 
twelve, midnight, waiting for the tide. 

To-day we are spinning down the Gulf of Oeorgia 
and Puget Sound, the wind direct astern, and have 
already left Vancouver and Victoria to the north. 
The sun is clear and soft, not hard and brilliant as 
in Dawson. Whales are blowing at play about the 



WILD SEAS AMONG THE FJORDS. 193 

ship, gulls skimming the air iu multitudes. All our 
company are over their seasickness and now mostly 
on deck. We are repacking our bags and the steamer 
trunk, taking off heavy winter flannels and outer 
wear, and preparing to hxnd at Seattle clad again in 
semi-summer clothes. 



194 IN TO THE YUKON. 



TWELFTH LETTER. 

seattle, the future mistress of the trade and 
commerce of the north. 

The Portland Hotel, 1 
Portland, Oregon, October 3, 1903. j 

Just one week ago to-day the steamer "Dolphin" 
landed ns safely at the pier at Seattle. The sail on 
Puget Sound, a body of deep water open for one 
hundred miles to the ocean, was delightful. We 
passed many vessels, one a great four-masted barque 
nearing its port after six or eight months' voyage 
round the Horn from Liverpool. 

Seattle lies upon a semi-circle of steep hills, curv- 
ing round the deep waters of the Sound like a new 
moon. An ideal site for a city and for a mighty sea- 
port, which some day it will be. Many big ships by 
the extensive piers and warehouses. The largest 
ships may come right alongside the wharves, even 
those drawing forty feet. The tracks of the Great 
Northern and Northern Pacific Railways bring the 
cars along the ship's side, and there load and un- 
load. All this we noted as our boat warped in to 
her berth. A great crowd awaited us. Many of our 
passengers were coming home from the far north 
after two and three years' absence. Friends and fam- 
ilies were there to greet them ; hotel runners and 
boarding-house hawkers; citizens, too, of the half 



SEATTLE. 195 

world who live by pillage of their fellowmen were 
there, and police and plain clothes men of the detec- 
tive service were there, all alike ready to greet the re- 
turning Klondiker with his greater or lesser poke of 
gold. It was exciting to look down upon them and 
watch their own excitement and emotion as they espied 
the home-comers upon the decks. We, as well, had all 
sorts of people among our passengers. Mostly the 
fortunate gold-finders who had made enough from 
the diggings to "come out" for the winter, and some, 
even to stay "out" for good. A young couple stood 
near me ; they were on their wedding trip ; they would 
spend the winter in balmy Los Angeles and then re- 
turn to the far north in the spring. An old man stood 
leaning on the rail. Deep lines marked his face, on 
which was yet stamped contentment. He had been 
"in" to see his son who had struck it rich on Domin- 
ion Creek, who had already put ' ' a hundred thousand 
in the bank, ' ' he said. He had with him a magnificent 
great, black Malamute, "leader of my boy's team and 
who once saved him. from death. The dog cost us 
a hundred dollars. I am taking him to Victoria. I 
couldn't let him go. His life shall be easy now," the 
old man added. Just then I noted a tall man in quiet 
gray down on the dock looking intently at two men 
who stood by one another a little to my left. They 
seemed to feel his glance, spoke together and moved 
uneasily away. They were a pair of "bad eggs" who 
had been warned out of the Yukon by the IMounted 
Police, and who were evidently expected in Seattle. 



196 IN TO THE YUKON. 

One, who wore a green vest and nugget chain, played 
the gentleman. The other, who worked with him, did 
the heavy work and had an ugly record. He was 
roughly dressed and wore a blue flannel shirt and a 
cap. A bull neck, face covered with dense-growing, 
close-cropped red beard, shifty gray eyes. He had 
been suspected of several murders and many hold- 
ups. Detectives frequently travel on ^hese boats, 
keeping watch upon the "bad men" who are sent 
out of the north. We probably had a few on board. 
In the captain's cabin, close to our own, were piled 
up more than half a million dollars in gold bars ; the 
passengers, most of them, carried dust. But the pair, 
and any pals they may have had along, had kept 
very quiet. They were spotted at the start. They 
knew it. Now they were spotted again, and this, too, 
they discerned. 

Seattle is the first homing port for all that army 
of thugs and scalawags who seek a new land like the 
far north, and who, when there discovered, are sum- 
marily hurried back again. It is said to be the ' ' near- 
est hell*' of any city on the coast. The hungry horde 
of vampire parasites would make a fat living from 
the pillage of the returned goldseeker if it were not 
for the vigilance of the police. A strong effort is 
now being made by the authorities of Seattle to stamp 
out this criminal class and drive it from the city. 

Our impression, as we crowded our way through 
the pressing throngs upon the pier and pushed on 
up into the city, was that we were in another Chicago. 



SEATTLE. 197 

Tall buildings, wide streets, fine shops-, great motion 
of the crowds upon the streets, many electric 
tram-cars running at brief intervals, and all 
crowded. 

On our trip up the Yukon we had made the pleas- 
ant acquaintance of a Mr. S and a Mr. of 

Columbus, 0. Keen and agreeable men who had been 
spending a month in Dawson puncturing a gold swin- 
dle into which an effort had been made to lead them 
and their friends by unscrupulous alleged bonanza 
kings. They had cleverly nipped the attempt in the 
bud, and were now returning, well satisfied with their 
achievements. We had become fast comrades and 
resolved to keep together yet another few days. We 
found our way to the Grand Rainier Hotel, one of 
Seattle's best, and now kept by the old host of the 
Gibson House in Cincinnati. 

Our favorable impressions of Seattle were con- 
firmed that night when our friends introduced us 
to the chief glory of Puget Sound, the monstrous 
and delicious crab, a crab as big as a dinner plate 
and more delicate than the most luscious lobster you 
ever ate. They boil him, cool him, crack him and 
serve him with mayonnaise dressing. You eat him, 
and continue to eat him as long as Providence gives 
you power, and when you have cracked the last shell 
and sucked the last claw, and finally desist, you con- 
tentedly comprehend that your palate has reflected to 
your brain all the gustatory sensations of a Delmonico 
banquet, with a Sousa band concert thrown in. 



198 IN TO THE YUKON. 

Saturday, after we had spent the morning in see- 
ing the shops and wandering along the fine streets 
of the choicer residence section of the city, we all 
took the tourist electric car, which, at 2 p. m., sets 
out and tours the town with a guide who, through a 
megaphone, explains the sights. 

Seattle now claims one hundred and twenty to one 
hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and prob- 
ably has almost that number. A distinctly new city, 
yet growing marvelously, and already possessing many 
great buildings of which a much larger town might 
well boast. 

Toward evening, at 4 :30 p. m., we took the through 
electric flyer, and sped across a country of many 
truck gardens and apple orchards, some thirty-five 
miles to Tacoma, that distance farther up the Sound, 
and once the rival of Seattle. A city more spread out 
and less well built, the creation of the promoters of 
the Northern Pacific Railway Co., in the palmy days 
of Henry Villard. Tacoma, too, possesses superb 
docking facilities and a good two miles of huge ware- 
houses and monstrous wharves, where, also, great 
ships are constantly loaded and unloaded for the 
Orient, South Africa and all the world, but whence 
few or no ships depart for the Northern Continent 
of Alaska. Tacoma seemed less alive and alert than 
Seattle, fewer people on the streets, smaller shops 
and business blocks, and the people moving more lei- 
surely along the thoroughfares. In Seattle the houses 
mostly fresh painted; in Tacoma the houses looking 



SEATTLE. 199 

dingy and as though not painted now for many a 
month. Seattle is noted for the public spirit of its 
citizens ; they work and pull together for the common 
weal, but Tacoma is so dominated by the railway in- 
fluence which created it, that the people are lacking 
in the vigor of the rival town. 

As our electric train came to a standstill, S 

rode up on his bicycle, and he was surely glad to see 

us. Messrs. S and W had come over with us 

for the ride, and we all five set right off to find our 
dinner. "Cracked Crabs" was again the word, and 

W added, '^Puget Sound oysters broiled on 

toast." A delicate little oyster about the size of one's 
finger nail, and most savory. When our party left 
the table, we were as contented a group as ever had 
dined. 

We lodged with S , and were delightfully 

cared for — a large, sunny room overlooking such a 
garden of roses and green turf as I never before have 
seen. Roses as big as peonies and grass as green and 
thick as the velvet turf of the Oxford "quads." Our 
host gave us each morning a dainty breakfast, and 
then we foraged for ourselves during the day. 

In the morning of Sunday we attended the Con- 
gregational Church, and in the afternoon rode on 
the electric car to the park, a few miles — two or three 
— out of the city, along the shores of one of the fine 
bays that indent the Sound. Not so fine a park as 
Vancouver's, but one that some day will probably rank 
among the more beautiful ones of our American cities. 



200 IN TO THE YUKON. 

On Monday we wandered about the town, visited 
its museum, saw the fine public buildings, and spent 
several hours in going over and through the most ex- 
tensive sawmill plant on the coast — "in the world," 
they say. The big business originally instituted by 
one of the early pioneers, is now managed by his 
four sons, all graduates of Yale. We met the elder 
of them in blue overalls and slouch hat, all mill dust. 
A keen, intelligent face. He works with his men 
and keeps the details of the business well in hand. 
How different, I thought, from the English manner 
of doing things. These men are rich, millionaires; 
college bred, they work with their men. In England 
they tell you that no man who would give his son a 
business career would think of sending him to col- 
lege. Oxford or Cambridge would there unfit him 
for business life. He would come out merely a "gen- 
tleman," which there means a man who does nothing, 
who earns no bread, but who lives forever a parasite 
on the toil of others. 

In these great mills the monstrous fir and pine 
logs of Washington are sawed up, cut, planed, and 
loaded directly into ships for all the markets of the 
earth — Europe, South Africa, Australia, China, South 
America and New York, wherever -these splendid 
woods are in demand. The forests of Washington 
and British Columbia are said to possess the finest 
timber in the world, and all the world seems to be 
now seeking to have of it. 



SEATTLE. 201 

Many fishing-boats were in the harbor and along 
the water-side, and many of the big sixty-foot canoes, 
dug out of a single immense log, paddled by Indians, 
were passing up and down the bay. Throughout the 
States of Washington and Oregon the Indians are 
the chief reliance of the hop growers for the picking 
of their crops, and every summer 's-end the various 
tribes along the coast gather to the work. They come 
from everywhere — from Vancouver's Island, from 
British Columbia and even from Alaska. They voy- 
age down the coast in their immense sea canoes, stop 
at the ports, or ascend the rivers, pushing as far as 
water will carry them. They bring the children and 
the old folks with them, they buy or hire horses, and 
they push hundreds of miles inland to the hop fields, 
where a merry holiday is made of the gathering of 
the hops. They were now returning, and many were 
passing through Tacoma. They were here outfitting, 
and spending their newly earned wages in buying all 
those useful and useless things an Indian wants — 
gay shawls and big ear-rings for the squaws, gaudy 
blankets, knives and guns for the bucks; even toys 
for the papooses. On the side the women were also 
selling baskets made in their seasons of leisure. In 
the shelter of the long pier one afternoon we came 
upon a group of several family canoes preparing for 
the long voyage to the north. A number of pale- 
face women were bargaining for baskets; one had 
just bought a toy canoe from an anxious mother, and 
I was fortunate in buying anpther. Near by a man 



202 ' IN TO THE YUKON. 

was carefully cutting out the figures of a Totem pole. 
They were evidently from Alaska. Alaska and a 
thousand miles or more of sea lay between them and 
home. They looked like a group of Japanese and 
spoke in gutteral throat tones. The Indians we lately 
met at Yakima were wholly different, being redskins 
of the interior, not the light yellow of the coast. 
When in Caribou Crossing, old Bishop Bumpus, who 
has spent more than forty years among the Indians 
of the north, told me that in his view the coast In- 
dians had originally come over from North Asia and 
were allied to the Mongolian races, while he believed 
that the red-tinged, eagle-nosed Indian of the interior 
was of Malay origin and of a race altogether dis- 
tinct. Be this as it may, the coast Indian, according 
to our preconceived ideas, is no Indian at all, but 
rather a bastard Jap. He fishes and hunts and works, 
and his labor is an important factor in solving the 
agricultural problems of the Pacific Coast. The 
enormous and profitable hop crops could not be gath- 
ered without him. 

We had hoped while in Tacoma to have had the 
chance of visiting some of the primeval forest re- 
gions of the State, where the largest trees are yet in 
undisturbed growth, but the opportunity of taking 
advantage of a railway excusion to Yakima, there 
to see the State Fair, was too good to be lost, and 

we accordingly made that journey instead. Mr. S 

had joined us in Tacoma, so we four bought excur- 
sion tickets, and climbed into one of eleven packed 



SEATTLE. 203 

passenger coaches of a Northern Pacific special, and 
made the trip. Eight hours of it, due east and south- 
east, across the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and 
down into the dry, arid Yakima River basin to the 
city — big village — of North Yakima. An arid val- 
ley, but yet green as an Irish hedge, a curious sight. 
The hills all round sere and brown, tufted and 
patched with dry buffalo grass and sage brush; the 
flat bottom lands mostly an emerald green; all this 
by irrigation, the first real irrigation I had yet seen. 
The river is robbed of its abundant waters, which are 
carried by innumerable ditches, and then again 
divided and sub-divided, until the whole level ex- 
panse of wide valley is soaked and drenched and con- 
verted into a smiling garden. Here and there a piece 
of land, unwatered, stretched brown and arid between 
the green. 

North Yakima, named from the Indian tribe that 
still dwells hard by upon its reservation, is a thriv- 
ing little place, the greenest lawns of the most vel- 
vety turf, roses and flowers abounding where the 
water comes. Trees shading its streets, which are 
bounded on each side by flowing gutters, and the 
driest, dustiest, vacant lots on earth. The fair is the 
annual State show of horses, cattle, sheep and fruits, 
and these we were glad to see. All fine, very fine, 
and such apples as I never before set eyes on. Thou- 
sands of boxes of Washington apples are now shipped 
to Chicago, and even to New York, so superior is 
their size and flavor. 



204 IN TO THE YUKON. 

Returning, we had an instance of the insolence of 
these great land grant fed railway corporations. While 
the Northern Pacific had advertised an excursion to 
Yakima and hauled eleven carloads of men, women 
and children to the fair, it yet made no extra pro- 
vision to take them back, so that when next day sev- 
eral hundred were at the station in order to board 
the train for home, only a few dozen could get in, 
and the very many saw with dismay the train pull 
away without them! We had got into a sleeper on 
the rear, fortunately, and thus escaped another 
twelve hours in the overcrowded little town. 

Yesterday we boarded the night express for Port- 
land. The country between this city and Tacoma is 
said to be rough and unsettled, and not fit for even 
lumbering or present cultivation, so we did not regret 
the travel at night. On the other hand, we saw much 
fine forest in crossing the Cascade Mountains, al- 
though the finest timber in the State is, I am told, 
over in that northwestern peninsula on the slopes of 
the Olympia Mountains, between Puget Sound and 
the Pacific. There the trees grow big, very big, and 
thence come the more gigantic of the logs, fifty and 
one hundred feet long and ten to twenty-five feet in 
diameter at the butt. 

The Puget Sound cities are destined to become 
among the chief marts of commerce and of trade upon 
the Pacific Coast, and they are filled with an ener- 
getic, intelligent population of the nation's best. The 
climate, too, though mild, is cool enough for the 






< 

H 


M 



SEATTLE. 207 

preservation of vigor. Roses bloom all the winter 
through in Tacoma, they tell me. And the summers 
are never overhot. The humidity of the atmosphere 
is the strangest thing to one of us from the East. 
**More like England than any other is the climate/* 
they say, and the exquisite velvet turf is the best 
evidence of this. But the most wonderful sight of 
all to my Kanawha eyes was the ever-present snow- 
massed dome of Mt. Rainier, lifting high into the 
sky, sixty miles away, but looking distant not more 
than ten. 

The third great center of the life of this north- 
west coast is Portland. Solid, slow, rich, conserva- 
tive. A hundred and twenty miles from the sea, but 
yet a seaport. Situated on the Willamette River, 
six miles from its confluence with the mighty Colum- 
bia. Already Seattle outstrips it in population, so 
a Portland man admitted to me to-day, yet Portland 
will always remain one of the great cities of the 
coast. It possesses many miles of fine docks; the 
waters about their piles are not quiet and serene, but 
swift and turbulent, sometimes mad and dangerous. 
It has a complete and extensive electric tramway 
system, and this evening we have ridden many miles 
about the city, and up by a cable road onto the 
heights, a straight pull four hundred feet in the air. 
Below us lay the city, level as a floor, the Willamette 
winding through it, crossed by many steel draw- 
bridges, while distant, to the north, we could just 
make out the two-mile-wide Columbia. Portland is a 



208 IN TO THE YUKON. 

wealthy and substantial city — a city for the elderly 
and well-to-do, while Seattle is the city for the young 
man and for the future. 

The lesson we have really been learning to-day, 
however, is not so much of Portland as of the river 
Columbia, the really "mighty Columbia." 

At 9 :30 we took a train on the Oregon Shortline 
Railway up along the Columbia — south shore — to the 
locks at the Cascades, a three hours' run, and then 
came down again upon a powerful steamboat of the 
Yukon type, though not so large. It took us about 
four and one-half hours with only three landings 
and with the current. The last fifteen or twenty 
miles of the trip the river was fully two miles wide, 
although at the Cascades it had narrowed to be no 
broader than the Kanawha. On either side the val- 
ley was generally occupied by farms and meadows, 
grazing cattle, many orchards, substantial farm- 
steads. A long-time settled country and naturally 
fertile. And along either shore, at intervals of not 
more than a quarter of a mile, were the fish-traps, 
the wheels, the divers handy contrivances of man, to 
catch the infatuated salmon. Until I saw the swarm- 
ing waters of that creek of Ketchikan, my mind had 
failed to comprehend the fatuity of these fish. This 
year, owing, they say, to the influence of the hatch- 
eries established by the Government, the catch of 
salmon here has been enormous; so great, in fact, 
that "hundreds of tons" of the salmon had to be 




AJ.ONG JlIK COLUMBIA RIVER. 



SEATTLE. 211 

thrown away, owing to the inability of the canneries 
to handle them before they had spoiled. 

The Portland people whom I have met and talked 
with all tell me that even though Seattle secures the 
Alaskan trade, even though Seattle and Tacoma ob- 
tain the lion 's share of the waxing commerce of China 
and Japan, yet will Portland be great, because 
she must ever remain the mistress of the trade of 
that vast region drained by the Columbia and the 
Willamette, all of whose products come to her by 
water, or by a rail haul that is wholly downgrade. 
And when I realize that the Columbia is plied by 
steamboats even up in Canada, a thousand miles in- 
land, where we traversed its valley on the Canadian 
Pacific Railway, and that when Uncle Sam has built 
a few more locks, these same boats can then come 
down to Portland, and Portland boats ascend even 
to the Canadian towns, as well as traverse Washing- 
ton and enter Idaho and Montana, then is it that I 
realize that the future of this fine city is most cer- 
tainly well assured. 



212 IN TO THE YUKON. 



THIRTEENTH LETTER. 
the valley of the willamette. 

State op Oregon, the Valley op the Wh^lamette, \ 

October 3, 1903. / 

From Portland to San Francisco. Written wliile moving 
thirty miles an hour on the Southern Pacific Railway. 

Here we are flying due south from Portland, cross- 
ing the entire State of Oregon. We have left Port- 
land on the 8:30 morning train — "The Southern 
Limited" — and shall be in "Frisco" at eight o'clock 
to-morrow night. We are now ascending the beautiful 
valley of the Willamette, ' ' Will-am-ett ; ' ' with a fierce 
accent on the am. Flat and level as a table — ten to 
twenty miles wide and two hundred miles long, ly- 
ing between the Coast Range on the west and the 
higher Cascade Mountains on the east. A land of 
perfect fertility, so gracious a country as I have 
never yet beheld. In winter, rarely any snow, plenty 
of rain and very much moist Scotch air. In summer, 
a sunshine that ripens fields of wheat, a moisture that 
grows the biggest apples and prunes and small fruits. 
Everyvrhere neat, tidy farmhouses, big barns. Great 
stacks of wheat straw and as big ones of hay, and 
these generally tented in with brown canvas. We 
are passing, too, extensive fields of hop vines, an es- 
pecially lucrative crop at present prices — twenty-five 
cents a pound, while seven cents is reckoned as the 



THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE. 213 

cost. Everywhere we see flocks of chickens, turkeys 
and some geese plucking the stubble fields, for the 
crops are all cut and harvested. And every now and 
then we espy a superb Mongolian pheasant in gor- 
geous plumage, for they have become acclimated and 
multiply in this salubrious climate. Herds of fine 
cattle and sheep are grazing in the meadows, and the 
horses are large and look well cared for. A rich, fat 
land, filled with a well-to-do population. I have just 
fallen into talk with a young lawyer who lives at the 
port of Toledo, where Uncle Sam is dredging the bar 
at the mouth of the Yaquina River, and to which city 
new railroads are coming from the interior, and where 
they expect a second Portland to grow up. He tells 
me that east of the Cascade Mountains lie other fer- 
tile valleys west of the Rockies, and where also is the 
great cattle and stock raising region of the State, 
and where moisture is precipitated sufficient to save 
the need of irrigation. 

Now we are just coming to the Umpqua River and 
the town of Roseburg — a garden full of superb roses 
blooming by the station — where stages may be taken 
to the coast at Coos Bay, another growing seaport 
section, where extensive coal mining and timbering 
prevail. And as the dusk grows we are passing over 
the divide to Rogue River and its verdant valley, 
which we shall traverse in the night. Oregon is green 
and the verdure much like that of England — the 
same moist skies, with a hotter summer sun urging 
all nature to do its best. 



214 IN TO THE YUKON. 

In the night we shall climb over the Siskiyou 
Mountains, and by dawn will be in sight of Mount 
Shasta. At Portland we were amidst mists and fogs 
and drizzling rain, so we caught no glimpses of Mt. 
Hood and Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helena and Mt. 
Jefferson, all of whose towering snow-clad cones may 
be seen on a clear day. We hope that to-morrow Mt. 
Shasta will be less bashful and not hide her white 
head. 

Sunday a. m., October 4th. 

In California! We were called at six o'clock that 
we might see Mt. Shasta, and also have a drink from 
the famous waters of Shasta Spring. Mt. Shasta we 
did not see, so great were the fog masses and mists 
enshrouding her, but we have had a drink from the 
elixir fountain. A water much like the springs at 
Addison, in Webster County, W. Va., but icy cold. 

Now we are coming down the lovely valley of the 
Sacramento. A downgrade all the way to "Frisco." 
The verdure is growing more tropical. The under- 
growth of the forests is more and more luxuriant. 
I see big, red lilies by the swift water-side. The air 
is milder. We have descended already 1,600 feet 
since passing Shasta Spring. We have five hundred 
feet more to drop to Oakland. We are now in a rug- 
gedly volcanic mining country, many iron, lead, cop- 
per mines and once placer diggings for gold, these 
latter now pretty much worked out, only a few Chi- 
nese laboriously washing here and there. 



THE VALLEY OP THE WILLAMETTE. 215 

Now we are at Keswick and see our first groves of 
figs and almonds and some wide-reaching palms and 
the spreading umbrella-trees, and many prune or- 
chards. The valley is widening, the air is warmer 
than we have known it for many days. We are surely 
in California. 

I have just been talking with the brakeman. He 
has been in Dawson and on the Klondike. "Mushed" 
through the White Pass, but, after reaching Dawson, 
he lost heart and came back again without a stake. 
The man who failed ! Another big man, with a strong 
jaw and keen eye, had just climbed on the rear plat- 
form. He, too, had been in Dawson, stayed one day, 
bought a claim in the morning for $1,000, and sold 
it in the evening for $15,000, and then came right 
back to his almond groves to invest his make and 
thereafter rest content with California. The man 
who won. 

Near us sits a black-eyed Russian woman, young 
and comely, whose husband was one of the discov- 
erers of gold in Nome, and with her the loveliest 
blue-eyed Norwegian maiden just arrived from Ham- 
merfest. "My husband's sister who is come to 
America to stay," the Russian says in perfect Eng- 
lish. She is learning to talk American, and wonders 
at the huge cars, the multitude of people, the dis- 
tances — ''only a few hours from Trondhjem to Kris- 
tiania, but over four days and nights from New York 
to Seattle!" she exclaims. And her blue eyes grow 



216 IN TO THE YUKON. 

big with wonder at the half-tropical panorama now 
unrolling before us. 

I am writing this letter by bits as we travel. "We 
are now on a straight track, as from my improved 
handwriting you may detect. A stretch of thirty- 
seven miles straight as the crow flies. We are past 
the smaller fruit farms of the upper Sacramento 
Valley; we are out on the interior plain that from 
here extends all down through California, a thousand 
miles almost to Mexico. We are in the wonderful 
garden land of the State. On either side of us 
stretches away, as far as the eye can see, a flat, level 
plain. It is one monstrous wheat field, and fences 
only at rare intervals mark it into separate holdings. 
On the east, far on the sky line, extend the snow- 
tipped summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains; on 
the west, the Coast Range. We have passed out of 
the region of mists and clouds, and are now in a 
clear, warm sunshine, the heavens an arching vault 
of cloudless blue. As clear as on the Yukon almost, 
but with many times the warmth. This is the region 
of the Mammoth Bonanza wheat farms you have so 
often read about. And one feels that man hereabouts 
does things in a big way. 

In Oregon, they tell me, the climate is so equable 
that a single blanket keeps you warm of night the 
year round. You need it in summer ; you do not need 
more in winter. Here, I fancy, you scarcely need 
any at all, so much further south have we already 
come. 



THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE. 217 

Even yet we are passing through the wide stretches 
of wheat lands, wheat now milled in California and 
sent in many big ships to the Orient. The Chinaman 
is just learning the joy of an American flap-jack or 
a loaf of wheat bread — and he can't get enough. 

Dusk has come down upon us before we have 
reached Carquinez Strait, over which our train — a 
long train — is carried by a monstrous ferry boat, and 
then, skirting San Francisco Bay, we are soon among 
the suburban illuminations of Oakland. Across the 
five miles of water lies San Francisco, its million glit- 
tering electric lights stretching several miles and cov- 
ering the hills on which the city is built, while far out 
on the right flashes the intermittent gleams of the 
light-houses marking the entrance of the Golden Gate. 
The ferry-boat taking us across is said to be the larg- 
est in the world, and the Norwegian lass's big blue 
eyes grow all the bigger as she looks about her on the 
multitude of fellow-passengers. And then we are 
ashore and are whirling through broad, well-lighted 
streets to our hotel, * * The Palace, ' ' where now we are. 



218 IN TO THE YUKON. 



FOURTEENTH LETTER. 

SAN FRANCISCO. 

Los Angeles, October 12, 1903. 

We slept in the old, famous, and yet well-patron- 
ized Palace Hotel, and on which the Fair estate has 
just renewed a mortgage for another term of years. 

In the morning we essayed to have a look at the 
city, and so took a long, wide electric car devoted to 
that purpose. A ride of thirty miles, and all for the 
price of only ' ' two bits ' ' ! We circled around the 
city, we traversed its streets and avenues, climbed 
and descended its multitude of hills, went every- 
where that an electric car might dare to go, and were 
given the chance to try the cable trams when the 
declivity was too steep for anything to move that did 
not cling. 

The sunshine was delicious, the watered lawns and 
watered flowers superb, the unwatered, blistered sand 
spaces, vacant lots and dust-laden winds dreadful. 

The city pleased and disappointed me. It is an 
old city — half a century old — old for the driving 
West, and mainly built of wood. Miles and miles of 
small, crowded, two-story, wooden dwellings, sadly 
needing a coat of paint, and mostly constructed thirty 
or forty years ago. A town once replete with vigor, 
that has slumbered for several decades, and is now 



SAN FRANCISCO. 219 

reviving into life again. The vast manvsions of the 
bonanza kings, the railway lords on *'Nob Hill," are 
now all out of date and mostly empty of their former 
occupants. The Fairs, the Mackeys, the O'Briens 
are dead, their heirs scattered to the winds. The 
Crokers, the Stanfords, the Iluntingtons are rem- 
iniscences. The street urchins know them no more. 
Fasliionable San Francisco has moved to another 
hill. The tenement quarter of the town has crept to 
their very doors. But the business section of the city 
has not moved as it has in New York. It stands just 
where it always stood. The Palace Hotel, once the 
glory and boast of the Pacific Slope, is still the chief 
hostelry of the town; and yet the city is instinct 
with a new life. Its lively, hustling thoroughfares 
are full of a new vigor; a new tide of Asiatic and 
Oriental commerce has entered the somewhat som- 
nolent city. All this, the magic result of the battle 
of Manila Bay, and the new relation of the United 
States to the far east. Where the Pacific Mail S. 
S. Co. sent a single monthly ship across the Pacific 
five years ago, now six lines of great freight and 
passenger steamships are unable to satisfy the in- 
creasing demands of trade. Now twenty steamers 
and a multitude of sailing craft come to deliver 
and take cargoes, where few or none came six 
years ago. On the land side, too, there is progress. 
The A. T. & Santa Fe Railway has broken through 
the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway Com- 
pany, so cleverly and firmly fastened by Huntington 



220 IN TO THE YUKON. 

and his friends; and there are hopes that other 
lines may yet establish independent relations with 
the city. Along with this new growth of commerce 
have come a new throng of energetic men, and new 
fortunes are being made — and more widely dis- 
tributed. The city, the commercial center, the ocean 
port, are all growing at a steadier, healthier gait 
than in the ancient feverish days of bonanza kings 
and railroad magnates. For awhile, San Francisco 
was "in the soup," so to speak. Its rich men were 
leaving it, did leave it; its sand-lots prole- 
tariat threatened to gain the upper hand; its mid- 
dle class, the people making and possessing only 
moderate incomes, were doubtful of a success that 
to them had not yet come. To the north, sleepy 
Portland had wakened up; Seattle and Tacoma 
had been born; and in the south, Los Angeles had 
risen, like a phoenix, from the torrid sands. But 
San Francisco did not stir. Then Dewey sank the 
fleet of Montejo; the nation quickened with a con- 
sciousness that it was a world-power; that the trade 
and commercial dominance of the Pacific lands 
and isles and seas were rightly hers, and in a night 
San Francisco found herself re-endowed with new 
life. 

After the tramway ride, we spent an afternoon 
strolling about through the business streets and along 
the docks and wharves, viewing the many new shops, 
splendid modern stores, quite equaling, in the sump- 
tuous display of their wares, the great trading 



SAN FRANCISCO. 221 

centers of New York and Chicago, and noting the 
volume of wholesale traffic on the down-town streets, 
the jobbing center, and the busy stir along the water- 
front for several miles. 

No finer sight have we seen than when we stood 
near the surf-washed rocks, famous as the home of 
the sea-lions, and, turning our gaze toward the wind- 
tossed billows of the Pacific Ocean, beheld eight 
or ten full-rigged ships and four-masted barques con- 
verging on the narrow entrance of the Golden Gate, 
coming in out of the west, laden with the teas and 
silks and commerce of the Orient, their multitudi- 
nous sails all set before the breeze, like a flock of 
white-winged sea birds, while slipping among them 
a steamer from Honolulu and another from Nome 
came swiftly in. 

Another day we were ferried five miles across the 
wide bay toward the north, to the pretty suburban 
residence section of Sansaulito, and there taking an 
electric road were brought to the foot of 'IMount 
Tamalpais, and then changing to a climbing car were 
pushed ten miles up near 4,000 feet into the air, 
to the top of a volcanic cone that rises out of 
sea and bay, and dominates the landscape for many 
miles. Below us, at our feet, lay the great Bay 
of San Francisco and the city itself, with its green, 
garden-like suburban villages, the many islands, the 
ships of war and of commerce, the narrows of the 
Golden Gate ; and, westward, the Pacific Ocean, with 
the distant Farralon Islands, outposts of the Orient, 



222 IN TO THE YUKON. 

while far to the east, peeping above the clouds, 
gleamed the snow-capped summits of the Sierra 
Nevadas. 

Another day, we visited the Presidio, and rejoiced 
to see the blue uniform of Uncle Sam after the many- 
weeks of red coats upon the Yukon. Say what you 
may, it quickens the blood to catch a glimpse of 
our boys in blue. I well remember how good it 
seemed when we met them in command of the fortress 
of El Moro, at Havana, two years ago. 

Wte also spent a night in Chinatown — or part of 
the night — for we were bound to see its horrors and 
its joys. The opium dens — a picture of Hop Sing 
and his cat, the beast also a victim of the habit — 
I bring home to you; the theatre, where the audi- 
ence and the actors were equally interested ; the Joss 
house or temple; the lady with the tiny feet, one 
of whose midget shoes I took off and have to show 
you; the barber shop where they shave the head and 
scrape out the ears and nose; the many handsome 
shops and almost priceless curios; and the swarms 
of bright-eyed, laughing, friendly, gentle children. 

While the Chinese upon the Pacific Coast, and in 
San Francisco more particularly, have been greatly 
lessened in number the last few years, it is interest- 
ing to note how many of the more progressive Japan- 
ese are now to be seen in all of the great cities 
along the Pacific coast. In Vancouver, all of the bell 
boys and elevator boys in the large Hotel Vancouver 
were bright-eyed Japs. Keen, intelligent, wide-awake 




A BIG REDW OOD. 



SAN FRANCISCO. 225 

little fellows, speaking good English, dressed in 
American style, and seeming to know their business 
perfectly. We saw them at Seattle and Tacoma and 
Portland, and now we find them in large numbers 
in San Francisco. They get along well with the 
white man. They dress like him, eat like him, walk 
like him, and try to look as much like him as pos- 
sible. They seek employment as servants, as day 
laborers, and are also getting extensively into trade 
in a small way. They keep prices up like a white 
man and join labor unions like the white man, and 
sympathetically act with him to a degree that elim- 
inates the prejudice that hedges in and drives out 
the Chinaman. The Japanese seem to supply a genu- 
ine want in the Pacific slope. I learned, also, that 
Japanese capital is now coming into California and 
making substantial investments, the expenditure of 
their money giving employment to American white 
labor. 

Coming down the Sacramento Valley the other 
day, I noticed that all the labor gangs employed by 
the Southern Pacific Railroad were Greeks, dull-look- 
ing Greeks who could speak no English. It seemed 
to me as I looked into their semi-Oriental faces, that 
they gave less promise of satisfactory American citi- 
zenship than did the up-to-date, alert, intelligent 
Japanese. The one represented a semi-Oriental coun- 
try, whose greatness was destroyed by Rome two 
thousand years ago; the other expressed the awak- 
ened intelligence of the new Orient, the new Japan 



226 IN TO THE YUKON. 

whose great modern navy to-day ranks first upon the 
Pacific. 

That night when we first crossed the bay toward 
the long line of glittering city, the tall Norwegian 
said to me : "I have sailed all about this world and 
visited many cities, but San Francisco suits me the 
very best of them all. And his black-eyed Tartar 
wife from Moscow exclaimed : ' ' Ah, I will never leave 
here till I die." All who visit San Francisco feel 
this subtle charm. There is a certain something in 
the air that soothes as well as stirs. Its lawns and 
flowers where water is applied; its sunshine, never 
too hot, for it is tempered by the breezes from the sea ; 
no winter, rarely a dash of snow ; no torrid sun ; an 
atmosphere almost gentle, yet not destroying energy. 

Leaving San Francisco, we took the little narrow- 
gauge railway that leads out south of the city, skirts 
the bay and climbs the Coast Range through the fa- 
mous grove of immense redwood trees that comes 
down to the sea at Santa Cruz. A pretty village 
among gardens and orchards of prunes and apricots 
and almonds, famous for its flowers and its fish. On 
the long pier we watched the Italian fishermen mend- 
ing their nets and loading them into their lateen- 
sailed boats. Here the rainbow-hued Barroda is 
caught in the deep sea and shipped to the city ; while, 
sitting all along the pier, were old folks and young 
catching smelts with hook and line. An old man with 
long, white beard said to me, as he took off a smelt 
and put it in his creel, **If a man has nothing to do 




ITALIAN FISHIXG CKAFT AT SAXTA CRUZ. 



SAN FRANCISCO. 229 

but just to live, this is the most salubrious spot along 
this coast. I've tried them all." 

From Santa Cruz we went over to the quaint old 
Spanish town of Monterey, once California's capital, 
now the barrack sanitarium of Uncle Sam's soldier 
boys, and upon whose quiet main street still dwells 
the Mexican- Spanish beauty to whom Tecumseh Sher- 
man once made love, and in whose garden yet grows 
the pomegranate he planted in token of their tryst. 
She has never wed, but treasures yet the memory of 
her soldier lover. 

Near Monterey is that marvelously lovely park, 
surrounding the great Del Monte Hotel, built by 
Crocker and Stanford and Huntington in their days 
of power, and where, among groves and lawns and 
gardens, winds the seventeen-mile drive of which the 
world has heard so much. Imagine the parks of Blen- 
heim and Chatsworth and Windsor all combined, but 
filled with palmettos and palms and semi-tropical 
verdure — giant live oaks and Norfolk pines and 
splendid redwood, with all the flowers of the earth, 
with ponds and fountains, and you will have some 
faint conception of the beauty of Del Monte, an ob- 
ject-lesson of what the landscape gardener may do in 
California. We regretted leaving this superb place, 
but were glad to have had even a glimpse of it. 

All the day we now hastened south on the flying 
^' Coast Limited," bound for Santa Barbara. First 
ascending the broad valley of Salinas River, the 
Coast Range close on our right, a higher range of 



230 IN TO THE YUKON. 

mountains on our left, until, converging, we pierced 
the barrier by a long tunnel and slid down to Santa 
Louis Obispo and then to the sea. Many monstrous 
fields of sugar beet, miles of prune and almond and 
apricot trees, thriving orchards all of them ; then mile 
after mile of wheat stubble, stacks of wheat straw, 
piles of sacked wheat at the by-stations ; then herds 
of cattle and many horses as we reached the head of 
the valley. A rich and fecund land, held originally 
in big estates, now beginning to be cut up into the 
smaller farms of the fruit growers. 

Toward the end of the afternoon we were skirting 
along by the breaker-lashed coast of the Pacific. A 
clear sky, a violent wind and tempestuous, foam- 
covered sea. We sat with the windows open, not 
minding the heat of the sun. The tide was at ebb, 
and upon the sand we saw many sea birds, gulls in 
myriads, snipe, plover, yellow-legis, sand-pipers in 
flocks, coots and curlew. We also passed a number of 
carriages driving close to the receding waters. 

The country grew constantly warmer, the soil re- 
sponding to cultivation with more and more luxuriant 
crops ; among these, fields of lima beans, miles of them, 
which are threshed out and shipped in enormous 
quantity. It was dark when we drew in at Santa 
Barbara, and we did not know what hotel to go to, 
but, tossing up, chose the Potter. Many runners were 
calling their hostelries; the Potter porter alone was 
silent. As we drove in his 'bus through the palm- 
bordered streets, a cozy home showing here and there 




THE FRANCISCAN GARDEN— SANTA BARBARA. 




THE SEA — SAXTA BARBARA. 




THE SEA — SANTA B.UIBAKA. 



SAN FRANCISCO. 235 

in the glare of an electric street light, we wondered 
what our luck would be. Imagine our delight when 
we drew up at the stately portal of a modern palace, 
built in the Spanish style and right on the borders of 
the sea. The moon was almost full, the tide near 
flood, the sunset breeze had died, the sea air soft and 
sweet, and the palace ours! A new hotel, two mil- 
lions its cost, no finer on the Pacific Coast. And in 
this off season the prices were most moderate. No- 
where yet have we been so sumptuously housed. In 
the lovely dining-room we sat at supper by a big 
window looking out over the moonlit sea. 

In the morning we wandered far down upon the 
beach, watching the breakers beyond the point, and 
later went up to the famous old Franciscan Monas- 
tery, a mile beyond the to\^Ti. A shrewd yet simple 
father in brown monk's robe who asked many ques- 
tions of the outside world, showed us all about, and 
in the garden stood for his photograph, quite pleased 
at the attention. No more charming wintering spot 
have we yet come to than Santa Barbara. 

In the late evening we entrained again and took the 
local for Los Angeles. For quite an hour and a half 
we ran close to the ocean, the perpetual breaking of 
the crested waves upon the shore sounding above the 
roar of the moving train. A yet greener land we now 
passed through, everywhere watered by irrigation, 
everywhere responding with seemingly greater luxu- 
riance. It was just dusk as we turned inland, and 
quite dark when we came through the big tunnel into 



236 IN TO THE YUKON. 

the head waters of the Los Angeles Valley. Just then 
a bright young fellow sat down beside me, and, talk- 
ing with him, I was pleased to find him from West 
Virginia. A. Judy, from Pendleton County. A few 
years ago the family had come to this southern 
land and all have prospered. He was full of the zest 
of the life that wins. 

Presently we came to many lights among shade 
trees, mostly palms, then houses and more lights, wide 
streets showing themselves. We were in Los Angeles, 
the metropolis of Southern California, the furtherest 
south that on this journey we shall go. 



LOS ANGELES. 237 



FIFTEENTH LETTER. 

LOS ANGELES, 

Los Angeles, October 13, 1903. 

We slept in Los Angeles with our windows wide 
open and felt no chill in the dry, balmy air, although 
a gentle breeze from seaward sifted through the lace 
curtains all night long. The sun was streaming in 
when at last we awoke to the sound of New England 
church bells. We breakfasted on plates piled high 
with big, red, sweet strawberries, dead ripe, evenly 
ripe, but not one whit over ripe. A ripeness and 
sweetness we have never before tasted, even in Ox- 
ford. In Seattle and Tacoma we met the royal crab 
of the Puget Sound, and found him big and bigger 
than the crabs of England and of France — big ax 
dinner plates, all of them, and now we find in the 
great, luscious strawberry of Los Angeles another 
American product as big as those that grow in the 
gardens of merrie England. 

Los Angeles ! How can I tell you of it and of the 
lovely region of the American Riviera all round about 
it? My ideas of Los Angeles had been indefinite. I 
had only heard of it. I only knew that up in Dawson 
and in Alaska the frost-stung digger for gold dreams 
of Southern California and the country of Los An- 
geles and when, during his seven long months of win- 



238 IN TO THE YUKON. 

ter and darkness, he assures himself of his stake and 
his fortune, he talks of the far south and prepares to 
go there and to end his days among these orange 
groves and olive orchards and teeming gardens. And 
when he dies — so it is said — every good Yukoner and 
Alaskan has no other prayer than to be translated to 
Southern California! So I had imagined much for 
this perhaps most charming of all regions of the semi- 
tropics, within the immediate borders of the United 
States. But I had not yet conceived the fine, modern 
city among all of this delight of climate and of ver- 
dure. A city with broad, asphalted business streets, 
built up on either side with new, modern sky-scrapeis 
far exceeding in bigness those of San Francisco. The 
edifices bordering Market Street in San Francisco are 
fine, but old in type — most or all erected thirty or 
forty years ago — while the many huge blocks of Los 
Angeles are as up to date as those of New York. It 
possesses two hundred miles of modern electric tram- 
ways, and H. E. Huntington has sold out his holdings 
in the Southern Pacific left him by his uncle, C. P. 
Huntington, and has put and is now putting his mil- 
lions into the electric tramway system of Los An- 
geles. 

During the morning we rode some thirty miles 
upon the tourist's car, seeing the city, its many fine 
parks, its public buildings, its business blocks, its ex- 
traordinary extent of imposing residences. And when 
we might ride no longer, we strolled on through 
Adams Street and Chester Place and St. James Place, 




MARENGO AVENUE— PASADENA. 




STREET VIEW — LOS ANGELES. 



LOS ANGELES. 241 

and among those sections of the residence quarter 
where no tramways are allowed to profane the public 
way. And here among these modern palaces, perhaps, 
we learned to comprehend the real inwardness of Los 
Angeles' astonishing growth, for many of these superb 
homes are not built and owned by the business men 
making fortunes out of the commerce of the city, but 
are built and owned by those who have already ac- 
quired fortunes in other parts of the United States 
and of the world, and who by reason of the geoial 
climate of Southern California, have come here to 
live out the balance of their days. Their incomes are 
derived from sources elsewhere than in California, 
and they spend freely of those incomes in the region 
of their new homes. . The exquisite lawns, the flower- 
ing shrubs, the tropical and semi-tropical palms and 
palmettos, all kept and cared for by means of the 
constant use of water and expert gardeners' skill, give 
to the city a residence section of marvelous charm. 
Water does it all, and man helps the water. 

Los Angeles possesses many fine churches and 
schools and two flourishing colleges. One run by the 
Methodist Church ; the other under the control of the 
State. From a city of twenty-five thousand in 1890, 
Los Angeles is now grown to one hundred' and twenty- 
five thousand, and is still expanding by leaps and 
bounds. It is the center of the fruit gardens and or- 
chards and citrus trade of Southern California, and 
is the mecca toward whose environs come in perpetual 



242 IN TO THE YUKON. 

procession the unending army of the world's *'One 
Lungers," and their friends. 

Of an afternoon we rode out to Pasadena in the 
swift, through electric train. Once a separate com- 
munity, now already become a suburb of the greater 
growing city. ''The finest climate on the earth," they 
say, and mankind from all parts of the earth are 
there to prove it. A large town of residences, each 
standing apart in its own garden; many surrounded 
by oranges and pomegranates and figs. Lovely homes 
and occupied by a cultivated society. 

We did not tarry to see the celebrated ostrich farm, 
which is one of the famous sights of Pasadena, but 
went on toward the mountain chain beyond and north 
of Pasadena to the base of towering Mount Low, and 
climbed right up its face a thousand feet on an in- 
clined plane steeper than any of Kanawha's, and then 
another thousand feet by five miles of winding electric 
railway. A wonderful ride into the blue sky, with a 
yet more wonderful panorama stretching for many 
miles beneath our feet. All the valley of the Los 
Angeles, the innumerable towns and villages and 
farms and groves and orchards and vineyards stretch- 
ing far as the eye could see until bounded by the 
mountains of Mexico to the south, and the shimmering 
waters of the Pacific to the west, and to the north and 
east a limitless expanse of scarred and serrated vol- 
canic mountain ranges, like the gigantic petrified 
waves of a mighty sea. Below us the perfect verdure 
of irrigated land, the patches and masses of green- 



LOS ANGELES. 243 

ness everywhere threaded and interspersed by the ir- 
rigating ditches and pools and ponds whereby the 
precious water is impounded and distributed when 
used. 

Los Angeles lies very near the center of an im- 
mense cove, whose sea line marks the great indenture 
on the southwest of the United States, where the coast 
bends in from Cape Conception and curves southeast- 
ward to the borders of Mexico, a total coastal frontage 
on the Pacific Ocean of near three hundred miles. 

On the north, the mountains of the Coast Range, 
and the westward, the jutting spurs of the Sierra Ne- 
vada come together and form a barrier against the 
cold northern airs. Eastward their extension forms a 
high barrier against the colder airs of the Rocky Moun- 
tain region. Los Angeles lies at about the point where 
these protecting mountain ranges recede to near sixty 
miles from the sea, itself some twenty and thirty miles 
from the twin ports of Santa Monica and San Pedro, 
and is the commercial center of this rich alluvial and 
sheltered region, of which Santa Barbara, on a lovely 
bay, is the chief northern center, and San Diego, one 
hundred and fifty miles to the south, upon the second 
finest harbor in California, is the most southern port 
and trade outlet. A vast ''ventura," as the Span- 
iards called it, upon this fertile plain and rolling 
upland anything will grow if only it has water. For 
three or four months in the year, from early Novem- 
ber to March, the skies pour down an ample rainfall, 
and the world is a garden. During the other eight 



244 IN TO THE YUKON. 

months, man — the active American — now irrigates 
the land with water stored during the rainy season, 
and thus a perpetual and prolific yield is won from 
the fecund soil. Here the famous seedless orange was 
discovered, perpetuated, and has become the most 
coveted citrous fruit. Fortunes have been made from 
the raising of these oranges alone. The immense and 
fragrant strawberries ripen every month the year 
round. Figs and pomegranates abound. Apples, 
pears, olives and grapes yield enormous and profitable 
crops. No frosts, no drouths. Last year Los Angeles 
and its contributing orchards shipped twenty-five 
thousand carloads of citrous fruit. This year they 
reckon to do yet more. Their capacity is only lim- 
ited by the markets ' demand, and both seem boundless. 
The air is dry like that of the Yukon Valley, and 
similarly, extremes of temperature are easily borne. 
It is never unpleasantly hot in Southern California, 
they say, just as the Yukoner vows he never suffers 
from the cold. ''Only give us water to wash our 
gold;" "water to irrigate our crops," cries each, 
**and we will become richer than the mind of man 
can think." But the types of men and women are 
somewhat different in the two extremes. A sturdier 
race wins fortune from the soil in the Klondike land ; 
there the children have rosier faces and are more 
alert. On the crowded streets of the southern city 
the pale presence of the "one lungers" is at once re- 
marked. But for this, the people might be the same. 



LOS ANGELES. 245 

We left this gracious garden land, with its gentle 
climate, by the midday train, this time leaving the 
coast and following the interior San Joaquin Valley 
route. Just at the outskirts of the city our train 
halted a moment, and, looking from the window, I 
saw a most astonishing spectacle — an extensive enclo- 
sure with a large, wide-roofed building in its midst, 
and enclosure, roof and air all thick with myriads of 
pigeons. Here is the greatest pigeon roost of the 
world, where an enterprising bird lover raises squabs 
by the thousands, cans them in his own factory, and 
sends them all over the earth to the delight of the 
epicure. Just why such myriads of birds should not 
fly away, I do not know, but there they were covering 
the ground, the roof, and filling the air in circular 
flights, and seemed rarely or never to leave the borders 
of the enclosure. 

For a few hours we retraced our way and then 
turned eastward across the edge of the great Mojave 
Desert. Crossing the barrier of the San Fernando 
Mountains on the north, through a mile-and-a-half- 
loug tunnel, we left the greenness of olive grove and 
orange orchard behind, and came out into a contin- 
ually more and more arid country. Cactus and yucca 
began to appear and to multiply, the dwarf shrunken 
palmetto of the Mexican plains grew more and more 
plentiful, and then we came through dry, parched 
gulches and caiions, out onto a dead flat plain stretch- 
ing away toward the eastern horizon as far as the eye 
could see — sand and sage brush and stunted cactus; 



246 IN TO THE YUKON. 

a hundred miles or more away a faint blue mountain 
range shomng in the slanting sunlight against the 
eastern sky. Dry and arid and hopeless to man and 
beast. A terrible waste to cross, or even to enter, and 
lifeless and desolate beyond concept. 

During the night we crossed over the high, arid 
Tehachapi Mountains and descended into the San Joa- 
quin Valley, traversing that wonderfully fertile gar- 
den land until in the morning we were at Oakland. 
We then crossed the five miles of wide harbor and 
took our last breakfast in the city of the Golden Gate. 

After night had fallen and I sat with my cigar, I 
chanced to fall in with an interesting young Jap, 
*'R. Onishi," on his first visit to America, correspond- 
ent of the ''Jije Shimpo," Tokio's greatest daily 
newspaper. He had come over to investigate the grow- 
ing rice plantations of Tc^Kas, Avith a vieAv to Japan- 
ese capital becoming interested in development there. 
He had been much impressed with the opportunity 
there offered, and should report favorably on the 
proposed enterprise. Not to use Japanese labor, but 
for Japanese capital under Japanese management to 
use American labor. So does the opportunity and 
natural wealth of our country begin to attract 
the investment of the stored wealth of Asia as well 
as of Europe. Like the rice dealer I met on the 
*' Kaiser Frederick," crossing the Atlantic two years 
ago, Mr. Onishi said that American rice brings the 
highest price of any in the markets of the world, and 
he looks for a large export trade to Asia of American 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 247 

rice, as well as wheat. And America, how vast and 
rich and hopeful a land it seemed to him ! 

I have now seen almost the entire Pacific Coast of 
our Northern American Continent. From Skagway, 
from Dawson to the sight of Mexico. Its old and its 
new towns and cities, its ports and trade centers have 
I visited, and greatly has the journey pleased and 
profited me. The dim perception of our future Pa- 
cific power that first dawned upon me at Vancouver 
has now become a settled conviction. We are just 
beginning to comprehend the future dominance and 
potency of our nation in Oriental trade, in commerce, 
in wealth, in enlightened supremacy. And it fills the 
imagination with boundless sweep to contemplate 
what are the possibilities of these great Pacific States. 

Among the cities of the future upon the Pacific 
Coast, Seattle and Los Angeles are the two that im- 
press me as affording the wider opportunity and cer- 
tainty of growth, wealth and controlling influence 
in trade, in commerce, in politics. If I were a young 
man just starting out, I should choose one of them, 
and in and through Seattle I believe there is the larger 
chance. Or if I were on life's threshold and, say, 
twenty-five and vigorous, I would pitch my tent 
within the confines of the continent of Alaska, and by 
energy, thrift and foresight, become one of its innu- 
merable future millionaires. 



248 IN TO THE YUKON. 



SIXTEENTH LETTER. 

SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 

Salt Lake City, Utah, October 14, 1903. 

We left San Francisco on the "Overland Limited" 
train, taking the ten o'clock boat across the bay to 
Oakland and there entering our car. It was a lovely- 
morning; the sky, blue, without a cloud; the sun, 
brilliant, and not so hot as at Los Angeles. The city, 
as we receded from it, lay spread before us, stretch- 
ing several miles along the water and quite covering 
the range of hills upon which it is built. Many 
great ships were at the quays, many were anchored 
out in the blue waters awaiting their turn to take 
on cargo, and among these several battleships and 
cruisers of our navy and one big monitor. Above 
the city hung a huge black pall of smoke, for soft 
coal — very soft — ^and thick asphaltic oil are the only 
fuels on this coast. We had come to San Francisco 
by night, and marveled at the myriad of electric 
lights that illumined it; we now left it by day, 
and yet more fully realized its metropolitan and 
commercial greatness. 

The ride, this time, was not along the northern 
breadth of the Sacramento Valley, but by the older 
route through the longer settled country to the south 
of it. Still many immense wheatfields, hundreds of 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 249 

sheep browsing among the stubble, and yet more of 
the orchards of ahnonds, prunes, apricots, figs and 
peaches. A monstrous fruit garden, for more than 
one hundred miles; and everywhere fruit was dry- 
ing in the sun, spread out in acres of small trays. 

At Sacramento, we crossed the river on a long iron 
bridge, and noted the many steamboats along the 
wharves — the river is navigable thus far for steam- 
boats — boats about the size of our Kanawha packets, 
and flows with a swift current. 

After leaving San Francisco, we began that long 
ascent, which at last should carry us over the passes 
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains some 6,000 feet above 
the sea. The grades are easy, though persistent, the 
track sweeping around mountain bases and along 
deep valleys in wide ascending curves. All the day, 
till evening, we were creeping up, up, up, following 
one long ridge and then another, the distant snow 
summits always before us and seemingly never much 
nearer than at first. The lower slopes were, like 
the Sacramento Valley, everywhere covered with well- 
kept orchards, and everywhere we noted the universal 
irrigation ditches of running water, constantly pres- 
ent beside us or traversing our way. 

As we climbed higher we began to see evidences of 
present and past placer mining, many of the moun- 
tain-sides being scarred and riven by the monitor- 
thrown jets of water. 

Just as the shadows began to fall aslant the 
higher valleys, we commenced that long and irksome 



250 IN TO THE YUKON. 

journeying throngh the snowsheds that, for so many 
miles, are necessary on this road. Coming over the 
Canadian Pacific, we met few snowsheds through 
the Rockies, and not more than two or three of 
them in the Selkirks, but here they buried us early 
and held on until long after the fall of night. 

This road, you know, was originally the Central 
Pacific, remaining so until swallowed by its stronger 
rival of the south, the Southern Pacific, which now 
owns and operates it. 

As we rode along, I could not help but recall its 
early history, the daring of its projectors, Hunt- 
ington, Crocker, Stanford and Hopkins, and how it 
never could or would have been built at all but 
for the aid of the thousands of Chinese who, under 
their Irish bosses, finally constructed it. 

This morning, when we awoke, we had long passed 
Reno in Nevada, and were flying down the Si- 
erras' eastern slopes through the alkali deserts of 
the interior basin, and all day long we have been 
crossing these plains of sand and sage brush and 
eternal alkali. We read of things, and think we 
are informed, but only when we see the world face 
to face do we begin to comprehend it. Only to-day 
have I learned to comprehend that Desert and Death 
are one. 

On the Canadian Pacific Railway we had beheld 
the great Columbia River plunge between the facing 
canyon cliffs of the Rocky Mountains and the Sel- 
kirks where they almost touch, the very apex of 




THK SAG1:BKL»H ASU AlilvAl^I DPJSEKT. 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 253 

that vast interior arid basin that stretches thence 
all across the United States and on into Mexico. 
At Yakima, in Washington State, we had crossed 
the Cascade range and found the arid valley made 
to bloom and blossom into a perpetual garden by 
means of the melting snows that there fed the Yakima 
Eiver and adjacent streams. Now we were again 
descending from the crests of the Sierra Nevadas, 
down into this same vast basin where no Columbia 
cuts it through and no Yakima irrigates its limit- 
less and solitary aridness. For more than three hun- 
dred miles have we now been traversing this expanse 
of parched and naked waste. No water, no life, 
no bird, no beast, no man. Two thousand miles and 
more it stretches north and south, from Canada 
into Mexico. Five hundred and forty miles is its 
narrowest width. We beheld a spur of it the other 
evening when we crossed the edge of the Mojave 
desert in Southern California; we should have trav- 
ersed it two days or more if we had taken the 
Southern Pacific route through Arizona. As wide 
in its narrowest part as from Charleston to New 
York, or to Chicago ! What courage and what temer- 
ity did those early pioneers possess who first ven- 
tured to cross it with their lumbering prairie-schoon- 
ers or on their grass-fed bronchos from the Eastern 
plains ! And how many there were who perished in 
the attempt ! Yet water will change even these 
blasted wastes, and, at the one or two stations where 



254 IN TO THE YUKON. 

artesian wells have been successfully sunk, we saw 
high-grown trees and verdant gardens. 

Late in the afternoon we begin to approach high, 
barren hills and mountain spurs, all brown and sere, 
save the sage brush. No cactus or even yucca here, 
and after climbing and crossing a long, dry ridge, 
found ourselves descending into flat, sandy reaches, 
that bore even no shrubs or plants whatsoever, save 
a dead and somber sedgy grass in sparse, feeble 
bunches, and while the land looked wet we saw no 
water. Then far to the southeast glimmered a 
silver streak, so faint that it seemed no more than 
mist, and the streak grew and broadened and" 
gleamed until we knew it to be, in fact, Utah^s 
Great Salt Lake. Later, we came yet nearer to it 
for a few miles, and then lost sight of it again. But 
the face of the land had changed. We saw cattle 
among the sage brush; cattle browsing on the sweet, 
dry grass that grows close under the sage-brush 
shadow on the better soils. Then we came to an oc- 
casional mud dugout hut and sometimes a wooden 
shack, and the country grew greener, grass — buf- 
falo bunch grass — became triumphant over the sage 
brush, and then, right in the midst of a waste of 
sere yellowness, was an emerald meadow of alfalfa 
and a man driving two stout horses hitched to a 
mowing-machine cutting it, two women raking it and 
tossing it. We were in the land of Mormondom, and 
beheld their works. Now, the whole country became 
green, irrigating ditches everywhere, substantial 




THE 3IORMON TEMPLE. 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 257 

farmhouses, large, well-built bams and outhouses, 
and miles of thrifty Lombardy poplars, marking the 
roadways and the boundaries of the fields. 

At Ogden, where we were three hours late, our 
sleeper was taken off the through train to Cheyenne 
and attached to the express for Salt Lake City. 
We made no further stops, but, for an hour, whirled 
through a green, fruitful, patiently-tilled landscape, 
whose fertility and productiveness delighted eye and 
brain. Many orchards, large, comfortable farm- 
steads; wide meadows, green and abundant, as in 
Holland, with cattle and horses feeding upon them; 
stubble wheatfields, with flocks of sheep ; great 
beet fields and kitchen gardens in full crops; and 
water — water in a thousand ditches everywhere! 
Big farm wagons, drawn by large, strong horses, we 
saw upon the highways; and farmers, in well-found 
vehicles, returning from the city to their homes. 

Then, far away, towering above all else, loomed 
a group of gray spires, like the distant view of the 
dominating pinnacles of the minsters and cathedrals 
of England and of France, and of Cologne. They 
were the spires of the great towers of the Mormon 
temple, that strange, imposing and splendid creation 
of the brain of Brigham Young. 

It was dusk when we reached the city. Electric 
lights were twinkling along the wide streets as we 
drove to our hotel. We have not yet seen the city, 
except for a short stroll under the glaring lights. 
But already it has made an indelible impression on 



258 IN TO THE YUKON. 

our minds. Only two cities upon this continent — 
cities of magnitude — have ever been created and laid 
out, by systematic forethought, before being entered 
and occupied by men. One, Washington, laid out 
according to a comprehensive and well-digested plan ; 
the other. Salt Lake City, the creation — as all else 
here — of Brigham Young. 

The streets of Salt Lake City are all as wide as 
Pennsylvania Avenue. The blocks, of ten acres each, 
immense. But these streets — the chief ones are 
perfectly asphalted; running water flows in every 
side gutter; great trees, long ago planted, shade 
every wide sidewalk; the electric tram-cars run on 
tracks along the middle of the thort>ughfare ; and 
the two wide roadways, on either side, are quite free 
from interfering wires and poles. Many great 
blocks of fine buildings now rise along the business 
sections, and the stores present as sumptuous dis- 
plays of goods and fabrics as anything we have seen 
in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. The 
town bears the marks of a great city. Oreat in its 
plan, great in its development, great in its destiny. 
Truly, a capital fit for the seat of power of the 
potent and comprehending Mormon church. 

All the morning we have been viewing concrete, 
practical Mormondom, and the sight has been most 
instructive. High above the buildings of the city 
tower the imposing spires and pinnacles of the Tem- 
ple, the most immense ecclesiastical structure on the 
North American continent. Thirty years was it in 




TIIK 310UM0X TITHING-HOL SE. 




Tllh: 310K310X "LION HOUSE." 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 261 

building, all of native granite, and costing more than 
four millions of dollars. It stands in the central 
square of the city, surrounded by a high adobe wall, 
and a Gentile may view only the exterior. 

Then we visited the famous Tabernacle beneath 
whose turtle-shaped roof 10,000 worshipers may sit, 
and whose acoustic properties are unrivaled in the 
world. You can hear a whisper and a pin drop two 
hundred feet away. In it is the immense organ pos- 
sessing five hundred and twenty stops, which, like 
the two great structures, was conceived and con- 
structed by the genius and patience of the Mormon 
architects. We were shown about the grounds of the 
ecclesiastical enclosure — though not permitted to 
enter the Temple — by a courteous-mannered lady 
whose black eyes fired with religious enthusiasm as 
she explained the great buildings. ''My son is a mis- 
sionary in Japan, giving his life to the Lord. He 
preaches in Japanese, and is translating our holy 
books into the Japanese tongue," she said, turning to 
an intelligent Japanese tourist who was of our party. 

We also bought some Mormon literature in the 
fine, modem sky-scraper buildings of the Deseret 
News, and the bright young man, selling us the books, 
showed us with evident pride the stores of elegantly 
printed and bound volumes, all done here in Salt Lake 
City. They print their books in every modern tongue, 
and their missionaries distribute them all over the 
world. 



262 IN TO THE YUKON. 

Later, we viewed the fine college buildings where 
higher education is given to the Mormon youth. We 
also saw the famous ''Lion House," over whose por- 
tal lies a sleeping lion, once the offices of Brigham 
Young, now occupied by the ecclesiastical managers 
of the church. And also we viewed the "Beehive 
House," where once Brigham dwelt; the Tithing 
House, where are received and stored the ecclesias- 
tical tithe tax of ten per cent, of all crops raised and 
moneys earned by the devoted Mormon believers ; and 
the great bank run in connection with it. 

All these evidences of practical, organized, devoted 
religious world zeal have we beheld gathered and cen- 
trally grouped in the great city founded and raised 
by these curious yet capable religious delusionists. 

I asked about Mormonism of a Gentile stranger 
from another State, and he replied in deferential 
tones: "No man in his senses now throws stones at 
the Mormons; they are among the most industrious, 
most thrifty and most respected people of the West." 

To wander along and through the residence sec- 
tion of the city is also a thing to surprise. Street 
after street of fine private dwellings, each mansion 
standing in its own garden, upon its own lawn. Many 
of them very modern, and many of them far exceed- 
ing in cost and imposing elegance any residence 
Charleston, West Virginia, can yet boast — equal to 
the most sumptuous homes of Pittsburg and St. Louis 
— and most of them owned and lived in by cultivated 
families of the Mormon cult. And how the zeal and 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 208 

faith and religious ardor of this strange s^t even now 
to-day burns in the atmosphere of this their Holy 
City! It is the same spirit that we met in Holy 
Moscow, Russia's sacred capital — but more enlight- 
ened, more practical. 

And Mormonism is already a political as well as 
religious power in the West. In Idaho, in Colorado, 
in Nevada, in Arizona, the Mormon vote is to be con- 
sidered and even catered to. In Alberta, the Mormon 
settlement is said to be the most prosperous in the 
province. In Mexico, the Mormon settlements, their 
astonishing productivity and fertility, are already 
teaching the wonder-struck Mexican what irrigated 
agriculture may do. And as I beheld this and the evi- 
dent success of a religious sect which mixes fanatical 
zeal with astute practical management, I asked myself 
what is the real secret of their accomplishment and 
their power ! Is it the theory and practice of polyg- 
amy. Did or does polygamy have anything to do with 
the unquestioned success and prosperity of the Mor- 
mon people ? I think not. Polygamy has been merely 
an incident, and the disappearance of polygamy has 
in nowise lessened the formidable growth of Mormon 
power. The secret, I think, is the secret of the amaz- 
ing growth and spread of early Christianity, the 
putting into actual practice the Christian doctrine of 
the brotherhood of man — with them the brotherhood 
of the Mormon man in particular. Once a Latter- 
day Saint, and all other Saints are ready to lend 
you a hand, and the organized and ably administered 



264 IN TO THE YUKON. 

mechanism of the church lends the new Saint a hand 
as well, and those hands once extended are never with- 
drawn except for powerful and well-merited cause. 
The Mormon farmer feels that back of his success is 
the ever helpful and protecting eye of his church in 
material as well as spiritual things. The Gentile 
farmer may succeed or may fail, and who cares ; but 
the Mormon must succeed. If he do not himself 
possess the innate power and force of character and 
judgment to get on, then men will guide and aid 
him who do possess that power, and so he gets on 
even in spite of himself. In a certain sense, the Mor- 
mons practice the doctrine of collective socialism, and 
that collective unity is the secret, I think, of their 
wonderful accomplishment. 

The creed of the brotherhood of man, and of man 
within the Christian pale, has been the secret of 
Christianity wherever it has won success. The failure 
to heed it and obey it is the cause of failure to every 
religious movement that has come to naught. And 
so long as the Mormon Church adheres to this fun- 
damental principle, just so long will it continue to be 
a power, and a power of increasing weight. 

And this cardinal principle is also the secret of 
their missionaries' success. All over the world they 
are, in every State of the Union, in nigh every land, 
and they serve without recompense, without pay even, 
as did the early missionaries of the Christian Church. 

There is and always has been a good deal of clev- 
erness in the leadership of the Mormon Church. It 





GREAT SALT LAKE. 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 267 

is an old adage that "The blood of her martyrs is 
the seed of the church, ' ' and the Mormon leaders have 
comprehended this from the start. Not only have 
they cultivated the Christian socialism of the early 
church, but they have also never fled from, but the 
rather have greatly profited by, a real good case of 
martyrdom. The buffets and kicks of the Gentile 
world have helped, have been essential in welding 
the Mormon believers into that political, religious and 
social solidarity so much sought by the leaders. They 
were driven from New York, from Ohio, from Mis- 
souri, then from Nauvoo. They have been shot, 
stoned, murdered by scores. They have been impris- 
oned and harried by the federal laws (very justly, 
perhaps). But the effect of all this has been only to 
make them stand together all the closer. 

Just now the attack upon Senator Smoot is profit- 
ing them immensely. He sits by and smi-e?:. lie 
has only one wife. He is no more oath-bound to his 
own church than is every Roman or Greek Archbishop 
vowed tc his. A matter of conscience only. The 
effort to oust him will probably fail, but it's a good 
thing for the church to have him hammered. The 
more martyrs, the fewer backsliders. The faithful 
line up, stand pat, the church grows. 

On the streets of Salt Lake City we have nofcd 
the very few vehicles of fashion anywhere to be s<^'en, 
and, on the other hand, the many substantial farm 
wagons which generally seem to be driven by a woman 
accompanied by one or more children, more usually 



268 IN TO THE YUKON. 

a half-grown boy. The men would seem to be work- 
ing on the farms, while the women come into town 
with the loads of produce. The faces, too, of these 
women were generally intelligent and contented. 

In our own country we frequently hear the Mor- 
mons denounced as polygamists. In Utah and the 
neighboring States you hear nothing about polygamy, 
and, upon inquiry, I was told that while once this 
tenet of the church had been urged and practiced, 
yet that under modern social conditions, which have 
come in with the railways, the younger Mormon of 
to-day finds that one woman is all that he can take 
care of, and shows no disposition to load himself up 
with the burden of half a dozen. To my observation, 
the strength and danger of Mormonism is not in 
polygamy, but rather in their social and political soli- 
darity, the Mormon president of the church wielding 
political influence over his followers similar to, al- 
though in no^vise so vast as, that of the Roman Pope. 

Be these things as they may, it is at any rate worth 
while for a modern Gentile to visit this center of the 
Mormon power, and gather from ocular evidence 
of its vital, living, forceful presence such lessons as 
he may. 

This afternoon we took a little railway and jour- 
neyed twelve miles to Saltair, the Atlantic City or 
Virginia Beach of this metropolis, and there we 
bathed in the supersaturated brine. I could swim on 
it, not in it, so buoyant was the water, and my chief 
difficulty was to keep my head out and my feet in. 



SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY. 269 

The lake is sixty miles wide by ninety miles long, with 
several islands of high, barren hills. A few boats 
ply on it. No fish can live in it, and the chief use of 
it is to evaporate its waters for supply of salt. After 
dipping in it we came out quite encrusted with a 
white film of intense salt. 

To-night we go on to Denver, through the canon 
of the Grand River. 



270 IN TO THE YUKON. 



SEVENTEENTH LETTER. 

A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 

Glenwood Spbings, October 16, 1903. 

We left Salt Lake City by the express last night 
over the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, starting 
three hours late. When we awoke, we were coming 
up the canyon of the Green River, one of the head 
streams of the Colorado, and had passed through the 
barren volcanic lava wastes of the Colorado Desert 
during the night. The Green River flows between 
sheer, naked volcanic rock masses, not very high, but 
jagged, no green thing growing upon them. But the 
scanty bottom lands were often green with alfalfa 
meadows and well-kept peach and apple orchards, the 
result of irrigation. 

From the valley of the Green River we crossed, 
passing through many deep cuts and tunnels, to the 
Grand River, the eastern fork of the Colorado, and 
followed up this stream all day. Very much the 
same sort of country as before. The bare, ragged, 
verdureless cliffs and rock masses, dry and plantless, 
only the red and yellow coloring of sandstone re- 
lieving the monotony, and everywhere upon the scant 
bottom lands the greenness and agriculture of irri- 
gation. The aspen and maples, all a bright yellow. 



A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 271 

but not so splendid a golden hue as the forests of the 
valley of the Yukon. 

Just before coming to Glenwood Springs, about 
noon, I had wandered beyond my sleeper into the 
smoking-car, thinking to have a view of the sort of 
men who got in and out at the way stations, and, 
seating myself in a vacant place, picked up a con- 
versation with my neighbor. Imagine my surprise 
when I found him to be a fellow West Virginian, 
from Clarksburg, taking a little summer trip in the 
West, himself a Mr. Bassel, nephew of the well-known 
lawyer, John Bassel, of upper State fame. He was 
going to stop off at Glenwood Springs to see one of 
Colorado's most popular sports, a "broncho-busting" 
match, where were to be gathered some of the most 
eminent masters of the art in the State. I consulted 
my time-tables, ascertained that we might spend the 
afternoon there and yet reach Denver the next morn- 
ing, and when the train pulled into the station, we 
were among the expectant throng who there detrained. 

The little town was all astir. A pile of Mexican 
saddles lay on the platform, and a crowd of big, 
brawny men in wide felt hats, leathern cowboy leg- 
gings and clanking spurs, were shouldering these, 
their belongings, and moving up into the town. 

The streets were full of people come in from the 
surrounding highlands, where, high up on the 
''mesas" or plateaus above the valleys, lie some of 
the finest cattle ranges in the State. Big, raw-boned, 
strong-chinned men they were, bronzed with the sun 



272 IN TO THE YUKON. 

and marked with a vigor bespeaking life in the open 
air. The ladies, too, were out in force, well dressed, 
not much color in their cheeks, but, like the men, 
possessing clean-cut, clear-eyed faces. And up and 
down the wide streets were continually galloping 
brawny riders, evidently arriving from their distant 
ranches. 

The crowd stuck to the sidewalk and seemed ex- 
pectant. We did not know just what was going to 
happen, but stuck to the sidewalk, too, and well for 
us it was that we did so. There were rumors of a 
parade. A number of ranch maidens, riding restive 
bronchos, some sitting gracefully astride, drew their 
horses to one side. The crowd was silent. We were 
silent, too. Just then a cloud of dust and a clatter 
of hoofs came swirling and echoing down the street. 
A troop of horses! They were running like mad. 
They were bridleless, riderless ; they were wild horses 
escaped. They ran like things possessed. No, not 
all were riderless, for behind them, urged by silent 
riders, each man with swinging lasso, came as many 
cowboys hot on the chase. Had the wild horses 
broken loose? Could they ever be headed off? We 
wondered. Was the fun for the day all vanished by 
the accident? Not so, we found. This was part of 
the game. Every broncho buster, if he would take 
part in the tests of ridership, must first catch a wild 
horse, that later an opponent should master. And 
the way those lassos swung and reached and dropped 
over the fleeing bronchos was in itself a sight worth 




NUCKOLDS, PUTTING OX THE HOODAMXK. 




NUCKOLDS, TIIK BllOXCHO "BUSTED." 



A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 275 

stopping to see. Then, as each rider came out of the 
dust and distance leading the wild-eyed, terrified 
beast by his unerring lasso, great was the acclaim 
given him by the hitherto silent multitude. Every 
loose horse was caught before he had run half a 
mile, and thus haltered — the lariat around the neck — 
was led to the corral near the big meadow, where the 
man who should ride most perfectly would win the 
longed-for prize — a champion's belt and a purse of 
gold. 

Many famous men were met there to win the tro- 
phy — the most coveted honor a Coloradan or any 
ranchman may possess. 

There was Marshall Nuckolds, of Rifle City, 
swarthy and black as an Indian, who had won more 
than one trophy in hard-fought contests — his square 
jaw meaning mastery of any four-footed thing that 
bucks. There was Red Grimsby, long, and lank and 
lithe as a Comanche, with a blue eye that tames a 
horse and man alike. There was big, loose-limbed 
Arizona IMoore, a new man in Glenwood, but pre- 
ceded by his fame. He it was who won that cow- 
boy race in Cheyenne, not long since, when his horse 
fell, and he underneath — dead, the shuddering au- 
dience thought him — and who shook himself loose, 
re-mounted his horse and won the race amidst the 
mad cheers of every mortal being on the course. He 
rode a fiery black mustang, and was dressed in gor- 
geous white Angora goat's hair leggins, a blue shirt, 
a handkerchief about his neck. Handy Harry Bunn, 



276 IN TO THE YUKON. 

of Divide Creek, was there too, a dapper little pile 
of bone and sinew, whom broncho, buck as he might, 
never yet had thrown. And Freddy Conners, solid 
and silent, and renowned among the boys on the 
ranches all 'round about. And the two Thompson 
brothers, of Aspen, home boys, the youngest, Dick, 
the pride of -Grand River, for hadn't he won the 
$100 saddle in the big match at Aspen last year, and 
then carried off the purse of gold at Rifle City on 
the Fourth of last July! Slim and clean-muscled, 
and quick as a flash he was, with a piercing black 
eye. The crowd on the streets were all betting on 
Dick, and Dick was watching Arizona Moore like 
a hawk. The honors probably lay between the two. 

The big meadow in the midst of the mile track 

was the place. H sat in the grandstand, my 

field-glasses in hand. I was invited to the judges* 
stand, and even allowed with my kodak out in the 
field among the judges who sat on their horses and 
followed the riders, taking points. 

Swarthy Nuckolds was the first man. He came 
out into the meadow carrying his own saddle and 
rope and bridle. To him had fallen a wiry bay, 
four-year old, never yet touched by man. First the 
horse was led out with a lasso halter around its 
neck, then, when it came to a standstill, Nuckolds, 
with the softness of a cat, slipped up and passed a 
rope halter over its head, which he made cleverly 
into a bitless bridle, then he stealthily, and 
before the horse knew it, hoodwinked it with a 




GRIMSBY AND THE JUDGES. 



A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 279 

leather band, and then when the horse could not 
see his motions, he gently, oh, so gently, laid the 
big Mexican saddle on its back, and had it double 
girted fast before the horse knew what had hap- 
pened. Then he waved his hand, the hoodwink was 
pulled off by two assistants, and instantly he was 
in the saddle astride the astonished beast. For a mo- 
ment the horse stood wild-eyed, sweating with terror 
— and then, and then — up it went like a bent hook, 
its head between its legs, its tail down, its legs all in 
a bunch, and down it came, stiff-kneed, taut as iron, 
and then up again, and so by leaps and bounds 
across the wide field and back again right through 
the scrambling crowd. All the while Nuckolds ris- 
ing and falling in perfect unison with the mad mo- 
tions of the terrified horse — his hat gone, his black 
hair flying, his great whip and heavy spurs goading 
the animal into subjection. At last he rode it on a 
trot, mastered, subjugated, cowed, up to the judges' 
stand. The horse stood quietly, trembling, sweating, 
wet as though having swum Grand River. Wild 
were the yells that greeted Nuckolds. He had but 
added to a reputation already made. 

''Grimsby next," was the command. His horse 
w^as a short-backed, spindle-tailed sorrel, with a sort 
of a vicious gait that boded a bad temper and stub- 
born mind. Again the halter was deftly put on and 
made into a bitless bridle, the hoodwink slipped on, 
the saddle gently placed, and man and horse were 
furiously rushing, bucking, leaping, rearing across 



280 IN TO THE YUKON. 

the meadow, and right straight at the high board 
wire fence. The horse, if it couldn't throw him, 
would jam and scrape him off if it ever reached that 
merciless mass of pine and barbed wire. Could 
Grimsby turn him, and without a bit? Great riding 
that was, and greater steering, for just before the 
seeming inevitable crash, the horse swerved, turned 
and was bucking across and then around the field 
again. Grimsby never failed to meet every wild 
movement, and sat in the saddle as though in a rock- 
ing-chair. The horse, at last conquered, stood quiet 
as a lamb, and the cheers for the sturdy rider quite 
equaled the plaudits given his raven-maned prede- 
cessor. 

Now the crowd had its blood up. Two native cham- 
pions had proved their grit, what could the Arizonian 
do against such as these? *^He's too big and awk- 
ward," said one onlooker. ''He's not the cut for a 
King buster," grunted another. "The h — 1 he ain't. 
Ain't he the man who won that Cheyenne race after 
his horse fell on him?" exclaimed one who knew, 
and the scoffers became silent. 

Arizona Moore strode clumsily under the weight 
of his big saddle, but his black eye shone clear and 
masterful, and I felt he was sure enough a man. 
His horse was a dark blood bay, well knit, clean 
limbed, short-barreled, full mane and tail, a fighter 
with the grit of a horse that dies before it yields. I 
stood quite near with my camera. It was difficult 
to get the rope bridle on, it was more difficult to put 




ARIZONA MOORE, UP. 




kV 



\ 






it' 



AlilZO.NA MOOKJ 



A BRONCHO-BUSTING MATCH. 283 

on the hoodwink, it was nigh impossible to set and 
cinch the saddle. But Moore did it all, easily, deftly, 
quietly. The hoodwink dropped, and instantly the 
slouchy, awkward stranger was riding that furious, 
leaping, cavorting, bucking, lunging creature as 
though horse and man were one. I have never beheld 
such riding. He sat to his saddle and every muscle 
and sinew kept perfect time to the fiery, furious move- 
ments of the horse. And he plied his whip and used 
his spurs and laughed with glee, as though he were 
on the velvet cushions of a Pullman car. The horse 
was stronger, more active, more violent than the two 
before. It whirled 'round and 'round until you were 
dizzy looking. It went up all in a bunch, it came down 
spread out, it came down with stiff legs, it reared, 
it plunged, it ran for the fence. Nothing could mar 
the joy of the rider nor stir that even, easy, tena- 
cious seat. "You've beat 'em all." **Nor can the 
others beat you," roared the crowd, as he rode the 
conquered animal on a gentle trot up to the judges' 
stand and leisurely dismounted. It was the greatest 
horsemanship I have ever seen, nor shall I again see 
the like for many a day. 

Bunn rode next. His horse was in full and fine 
condition. It leaped, it bucked, it raced for the 
fence, it reared, it even sat down and started to roll 
backwards, a terrible thing to happen, and often 
bringing death to an incautious rider. But Bunn 
never lost his seat, nor did the horse stay long upon 
its haunches, for, stung by rawhide and spur, it 



284 IN TO THE YUKON. 

sprang to its feet and tore across the meadow, ac- 
tually leaping clean and sheer the impounding fence. 
And Bunn, vanquishing at last, walked his quiet 
horse peacefully up and dismounted. 

The Thompson boys each covered themselves with 
glory. Dick's first horse was tamed so quickly — a big, 
bright bay — that they brought him a second one to 
ride again — a long, lean, dun-colored, Roman-nosed 
cayuse, with scant mane and tail. A mean beast, the 
sort of a horse that other horses in the bunch scorn 
to keep company with and hate with natural good 
horse sense. He stood very quiet through bridling, 
hoodwinking and saddling. He had seen the others 
in the game. His mind was quite made up. And 
when Dick vaulted into the saddle, he at first stood 
stock still, and then, as I ^et my kodak, I could see 
nothing but one great cloud of dun-colored dust and 
Thompson's head floating in the upper levels of the 
haze. The horse was whirling and bucking all at 
the same instant, a hump-buck, a flat buck, an iron- 
legged buck, a touch-ground-with-belly buck, and a 
swirling-whirl and tail-and-neck twist at one and the 
same moment. Enough to throw a tender seat a hun- 
dred feet and crack his bones like pipe stems. And 
then, like the flight of an arrow from a bow, that 
dun-colored devil bolted straight for the wickedest 
edge of the fence. I thought Dick would be killed 
certain, but there he sat and drew that horse down on 
its hams three feet from sure death. It w^as a long 
battle, vicious, mean, fierce, merciless — the beast was 




tul: ciiuuD AT till: buo.nctio-blsttag match. 



A BRONCHO-BUSTING MxVTCU. 287 

bleeding, welts stood out on flanks and shoulders, its 
dry, spare muscles trembled like leaves shaken by 
wind. 

The boy hero of Aspen was hero still, and the dun 
horse walked quietly up to the judges' horses and 
allowed himself to be unsaddled without as much 
as a flinch, and he, too, was drenching wet, as well 
as bloody. 

I did not see the last rider, for my train was 
soon to leave, and I barely had time to get aboard. 
But I got some fine kodak photographs, and have 
promised to send a set to the old, gray-headed rancher 
who stood near me and who almost cried for joy to 
see how these men rode. "I've seven boys," he said, 
''and every one of 'em's a broncho buster; even the 
gals can bust a broncho, that they can." 

I have not learned who got the coveted prize belt, 
but I should divide it between Arizona Moore and 
Dandy Dick. 



288 IN TO THE YUKON. 



EIGHTEENTH LETTER. 

COLORADO AND DENVER. 

Denver, October 19th. 

After leaving Glenwood Springs we wound up 
the gorge of the Grand Eiver, the castellated, cren- 
elated, serrated, scarped and wind-worn cliffs tower- 
ing many thousand feet into the blue sky. The val- 
ley narrowed sensibly and the sheer heights im- 
posed themselves more and more upon us as we 
approached the tunnel at the height of land 
10,200 feet above the sea, and where part the waters 
of the Gulf of Mexico from those of the Pacific. 
On the Canadian Pacific Railway, the interoceanic 
divide between the waters of Hudson Bay and the 
Pacific is only some 5,300 feet above tide level, so 
now we were near a mile higher in the air. Yet the 
long journey of 2,000 miles from San Francisco, the 
crossing of the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch ranges, 
had brought us to this final ascent almost unper- 
ceived. 

Traversing the divide and coming out from the 
long tunnel which bows above the continental height 
of land, we diverged from the main line and crept 
yet higher right up into Leadville, where the air 
was thin and keen and as chill as in December. 
Thence we descended through the wonderful canon 
of the Platte River that has made this journey on the 



COLORADO AND DENVER. 289 

Denver and Rio Grande Railway famous the world 
round. 

We came to Denver early in the morning; the 
metropolis of the middle West, the chief railroad 
center west of the Missouri, the mining center of all 
the Rocky Mountain mineral belt, and now claiming 
to be equally the center of the great and rapidly 
growing irrigated agricultural region of the inter 
and juxta mountain region of the continent. Essen- 
tially a business place is Denver. Its buildings are 
as elegant as those of New York City, many of them 
almost as pretentious as those of Chicago, as solid 
as those of Pittsburg, and as new as the fine blocks 
of Los Angeles. She is altogether a more modern 
city than San Francisco, is Denver. Her residences 
are also up to date, handsome, substantial. The 
homes of men who are making money. Her one hun- 
dred and eighty miles of electric tramways are good, 
though not quite as good as the two hundred miles 
of Los Angeles. Her schools are probably unex- 
celled in the Union. Denver is new, and in the clear, 
translucent atmosphere looks yet newer; she is neat, 
she is ambitious, and she is gathering to herself the 
commerce, the trade, the manufacturing pre-emi- 
nence, the mining supervision of all that vast section 
of our continent from Canada to Mexico, from the 
great plains to the sno\vy summits of the Cascades 
and Sierra Nevadas. All this is Denver, while at 
the same time she is the capital of Colorado, a State 
four times as big as West Virginia, though with 



290 IN TO THE YUKON. 

only half the population. And Denver is so fast 
seated in the saddle of state prosperity that no sec- 
tion of Colorado can prosper, no interest can grow 
nor develop, neither the gold and silver mining with 
its yield of forty millions a year, nor the iron and 
coal fields — 30,000 square miles of coal fields — nor 
the agriculture and grazing interests, worth eighty 
millions a year (now exceeding the value of the 
gold and silver produced twice over), none of these 
can grow and gain, but they immediately and per- 
manently pay tribute to Denver. 

Yet this very up-to-dateness of Denver robs it of 
a certain charm. You might just as well be at home 
as to be in Denver. The people look the same, they 
dress the same, they walk the same, they talk the 
same. Just a few more of them, that's all. 

There are none of the lovely lawns and gardens 
of Los Angeles and Tacoma in Denver, nor can there 
ever be. Roses do not bloom all the winter through, 
nor in Denver does the turf grow thick and velvety 
green as in Seattle, nor can they ever do so — only a 
few weakly roses in the summer-time and grass — 
only grass when you water each blade with a hose 
three times a day. And then, too, men do not go to 
Denver to make homes; they go there the rather to 
make fortunes, and, if successful, then to hurry away 
and live in a more congenial clime. 

Denver is not laid out with the imposing regal- 
ness of Salt Lake City, nor can it ever possess the 
dignity of that place. It is just a big, hustling, com- 



COLORADO AND DENVER. 291 

mercial, manufacturinof, mine-developinf? center, 
where the well man comes to work and toil with fe- 
verish energy in the thin air; and the sick man — the 
consumptive — comes to live a little while and die — 
**One Lungers" do not here hold fast to life as in 
the more tender climate of southern California — nor 
can they survive long in Denver's harsh, keen air. 

The loveliest, grandest part of Denver is that 
which it does not possess. It is the splendid pano- 
rama of the Rocky Mountain chain that stretches, 
a monstrous mass of snow-clad summits, along the 
western horizon, eighteen to thirty miles away. 
Across a flat and treeless plain you behold the long 
line of lesser summits, and then lifting behind them, 
towering skyward, the splendid procession of snow- 
clad giants, glittering and flashing in the translucent 
light of the full shining sun. The panorama is 
sublime, as fine as anything in Switzerland, and of 
a beauty worthy of a journey — a long journey — to be- 
hold. In Canada, the Rockies come so slowly upon 
you that they seem almost insignificant compared 
with their repute. But here, one realizes in fullest 
sense the dignity of this stupendous backbone of the 
continent. And the pelucid atmosphere of the mile- 
high altitude, gives renewed and re-enforced vision 
to the eye. The gigantic mountains stand forth with 
such distinctness that the old tale of the Englishman 
who set out to walk to them before breakfast — think- 
ing them three instead of thirty miles away — is likely 
enough to have more than once occurred. 



292 IN TO THE YUKON. 

The great '' Mountain Empire State" of Colorado 
is vastly rich in deposits of gold and silver and lead 
and antimony and copper and coal and iron, yet 
very few there are, or ever can be, who do or may 
amass fortunes therefrom. Her coal beds exceed in 
area the entire State of West Virginia nearly twice 
over, yet thousands of acres lie unworked and are now 
practically unworkable. Her oil fields are promis- 
ing, a paraffine oil of high grade, yet no oil pro- 
ducer has or can make any great stake out of them. 
Her agriculture and grazing interests already ex- 
ceed the enormous values of her gold and silver, yet 
few farmers or cattle men make more than a living. 
Colorado is rich, fabulously rich, yet the wealth that 
is wrung from her rocks and her pastures and her 
tilled fields passes most of it into hands other than 
those who produce it. 

The great railroad corporations get the first 
whack. It has cost enormously to build them; they 
are expensive to maintain; they are safe from com- 
petition by reason of the initial cost of their con- 
struction. They are entitled to consideration, and 
they demand it and enforce it to the limit. The 
freight rates are appalling, and so adjusted as to 
squeeze out of every natural product the cream of 
profit it may yield — sometimes only very thin skim 
milk is left. The passenger fares are high, usually 
four cents to ten cents per mile. The cost of living 
is onerous in Colorado; all freights brought there 
pay excessive tribute to the railways. So much for 



COLORADO AND DENVER. 293 

the general conditions. With mining it is yet more 
serious. The Rockefeller-Gugenheim Smelter com- 
bine now controls mercilessly all the smelting busi- 
ness of the State, and, as for that, of the mining 
country. And unless you have an ore that ''will 
yield more than $20 per ton, you might as well not 
go into the mining business," experienced mining 
men repeatedly observed to me. 

Colorado boasts enormous agricultural and graz- 
ing wealth. She claims that the present values of her 
herds of cattle and horses, and flocks of sheep, of 
her orchards and irrigated crops already exceed 
that of her gold and silver and mineral production. 
This may be so, and yet after the cattle and sheep 
and horses are transported to distant markets and 
converted into cash, after her farmers have paid the 
enormous irrigation charges to the private corpora- 
tions that control the water springs, the man on the 
soil makes little more than a bare living, the fat 
profits, if any there be, having passed into the ca- 
pacious pockets of the water companies, of the trans- 
portation companies, of the great meat-packing and 
horse-buying companies. The farmers and grazers 
with whom I have talked tell me that if they come 
out even at the end of the year, with a small and 
moderate profit, they count themselves fortunate. 
Here and there, of course, a fortune may be amassed 
by an unusual piece of good luck by the man 
who raises cattle or fruit, or crops, but as a rule the 



294 IN TO THE YUKON. 

undoubted profits of these industries are absorbed by 
the great corporate interests at whose mercy they lie. 

Just what will be the outcome of these crushing 
industrial conditions it is difficult to forecast, but we 
already see the first expressions of popular dissatis- 
faction in the extensive labor strikes now prevailing 
in the Cripple Creek region, and threatening to 
spread to and include all of the mining camps and 
operations of the State and adjoining States. Cor- 
porate greed and unscrupulous selfishness arouse op- 
position, and then ensues corresponding combina- 
tion, and too often counter aggression quite as un- 
reasonable and quite as inconsiderate in scope and 
action. Men are but mortal, and *'an eye for an 
eye" is too ancient an adage to have lost its force in 
this twentieth century. 

Just how these transportation, mining, agricul- 
tural and industrial problems will be finally solved 
I dare not premise, but we will trust that the ulti- 
mate good sense of American manhood will work out 
a reasonable solution. 



ACROiSS NEBRASK^V. 295 



NINETEENTH LETTER. 

ACROSS NEBRASKA. 

Ox Burlington Route Express, \ 
October 20, 1903. | 

We left Denver upon the night express over the 
Burlington Railway system, and all day to-day are 
flying eastward across flat, flat Nebraska. 

At dawn the country looked parched and treeless; 
expanses of buffalo grass and herds of cattle. Here 
and there the coarse of a dusky stream marked by 
straggling cottonwood trees and alders, their leaves 
now turned a dull yellow brown. A drear land, but 
yet less heart-sickening than the stretches of bleak 
and barren landscape we have so often gazed upon 
through Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Despite the 
dry and parched appearance of this immediate region, 
it is yet counted a fine grazing country, and the cattle 
range and thrive all the year round upon the tufted 
bunches of the sweet, nutritious buffalo-grass that 
everywhere here naturally abounds. 

By middle morning we are entering the more east- 
em farming section of the State, though still in west- 
em Nebraska. The land is all fenced, laid out in 
large farms, the fences and public roads running 
north and south and east and west. The farm- 
houses are neat, mostly, and set in tidy j^ards with 



296 IN TO THE YUKON. 

groves of trees planted about. Large red barns, 
many hay and wheat stacks, illimitable fields of thick- 
growing wheat stubble, and miles of corn, the stalks 
bearing the large ears yet standing in the hill, while, 
as a general thing, the roughness has all been gath- 
ered- in — the Southern way of handling the com 
crops. No shocks standing like wigwams in the 
fields. 

Fall plowing is also under way. We have just 
passed a man sitting on a sulky plow, driving four 
big horses abreast, his little six-year old daughter 
on his knee. A pretty sight. There are many wind- 
mills, one near each house and barn, some out in the 
wide fields, all pumping water, turned by the prairie 
winds that forever blow. 

We are passing many small towns. All just alike. 
The square-fronted stores, the steepled churches, the 
neat residences, rows of trees planted along either 
side of the streets. "That dreadful American mon- 
otony," as foreign visitors exclaim! 

The country looks just like the flat prairie sec- 
tion of Manitoba, Assiniboia and Alberta, in Canada, 
that we traversed in August, except that this is all 
occupied and intelligently tilled, while the most part 
of that is yet open to the roaming coyote, and may 
be yet purchased from the Canadian Government or 
from the Railway Company, as is rapidly being done. 
And this country here looks longer settled than does 
northern Minnesota and North Dakota through which 
we passed. 



ACROSS NEBRASKA. 297 

The planting of trees in Nebraska seems to have 
been very general, and along the roadways, the farm 
division lines, and about the farmsteads and in the 
towns are now multitudes of large and umbrageous 
trees. And sometimes large areas have been planted, 
and are now become veritable woodland. 

At the town of Lincoln, Mr. W. J. Bryan's home 
city, we have stopped quite awhile, and in the dis- 
tance can see the tall, white, dome-hooded cupola of 
the State Capitol through the yellow and brown fo- 
liage of autumnal tinted cottonwood. 

Sitting in the forward smoker and falling into 
conversation with a group of Nebraska farmers, I 
found a number of substantial Democrats among 
them, admirers of but no longer adherents of ]\Ir. 
Bryan — *'Our crops have never been so good and 
gold never so cheap and so plenty as during the last 
few years," they said. And they were not surprised 
when they saw by the quotation of silver in the Den- 
ver morning paper that silver had never risen to so 
high a price in the open market as it holds to-day, 
sixty-eight cents per ounce. And they spoke of 
Grover Cleveland with pi'ofound respect. In Ne- 
braska, they tell me, all possibility of a recrudes- 
cence of the Bryan vagaries is now certainly dead, 
and that this fine agricultural State is as surely Re- 
publican as is Ohio. The farmers are all doing well, 
making money and saving money. They are fast 
paying off such land mortgages as remain. Also, 
there are now few, very few, unoccupied lands in 



298 IN TO THE YUKON. 

Nebraska. The State is practically filled up, and 
filled up with a permanent and contented popula- 
tion. As families grow, and sons and daughters come 
to manhood and womanhood, the old farms must be 
cut up and divided among them, or the surplus 
young folk must seek homes elsewhere. And of this 
surplus some are among the great American treck 
into the Canadian far north. 

We reached Omaha, the chief city of Nebraska, 
late in the afternoon, coming into the fine granite 
station of the Burlington Railway system. 

While in the city we were delightfully taken care 
of by our old school and college friends, to whom the 
vanished years were yet but a passing breath. We 
were sumptuously entertained at a banquet at the 
Omaha Club. We were dined and lunched and 
driven about ^dth a warm-hearted hospitality which 
may only have its origin in a heart-to-heart friendship, 
which, beginning among young men at life's thresh- 
old, comes down the procession of the years un- 
changed and as affectionately demonstrative as 
though we were all yet boys again. It carried me 
back to the days when we sat together and sang that 
famous German student song: "Denkt Oft Ihr 
Brueder an Unserer Junglingsfruehligkeit, es Kommt 
Nicht Wieder, Die Goldene Zeit." 

Omaha, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, forms, to- 
gether with Kansas City on the south and St. Paul, 
and Minneapolis on the north, the middle of the three 
chief population centers between St. Louis, Chicago 



ACROSS NEBRASKA. 299 

and Denver. It is the chief commercial center of 
Nebraska and of South Dakota, southern Montana 
and Idaho, and controls an immense trade. 

In old times it was the chief town on the Missouri 
above St. Louis and still maintains the lead it then 
acquired. I was surprised to find it situated on a 
number of hills, some quite steep, others once steep- 
er, now graded down to modern requirements. Its 
streets are wide and fairly well paved, and its 
blocks of buildings substantial. The residence streets 
we drove thix)ugh contain many handsome houses, 
light yellow-buff brick being generally used, while 
Denver is a red brick town. The parks, enclosing 
hill and dale, are of considerable natural beauty, here 
again having advantage over Denver, where the flat- 
tened prairie roll presents few opportunities for 
landscape gardening. 

The extensive stockyards and abattoirs of Armour, 
Swift and several other companies have made Omaha 
even a greater center of the meat trade than Kansas 
City. In company with W I spent the morn- 
ing in inspecting these extensive establishments. 
The volum<^ of business here transacted reaches out 
into all the chief grazing lands of the far West. The 
stockyards are supposed to be run by companies in- 
dependent of the packing-houses, and to be merely 
hotels where the cattle brought in may be lodged and 
boarded until sold, and the cattle brokers are pre- 
sumed to be the agents of the cattle owners who have 
shipped the stock, and to procure for these owners 



300 IN TO THE YUKON. 

the highest price possible. But, as a matter of fact, 
the packing-houses control the stockyards, dominate 
the brokers, who are constantly near to them and far 
from the cattle o^vners, and the man on the range 
who once ships his cattle over the railroads, forth- 
with places himself at the mercy of the packer — the 
stock having been shipped must be fed and cared for 
either on the cars or in the yards, and this takes 
money — so the quicker the sale of them is made the 
better for the owner. Hence, inasmuch as the packer 
may refuse to buy until the waiting stock shall eat 
their heads off — the owner, through the broker, is 
compelled to sell as soon as he can, and is compelled 
to accept whatsoever price the packer may choose to 
offer him. So the packing companies grow steadily 
richer and their business spreads and Omaha in- 
creases also. 

The other chief industry of Omaha is the great 
smelter belonging to the trust. Incorporated origi- 
nally by a group of enterprising Omaha men as a 
local enterprise, it was later sold out to the Gugen- 
heim Trust, whose influence with the several rail- 
roads centering in Omaha has been sufficient to pre- 
serve the business there, though the smelter is really 
far away from ores and fluxes. 

These two enterprises, the cattle killing and pack- 
ing and ore-reducing, together with large railway 
shops, constitute the chief industrial interests of 
Omaha, and, for the rest, the city depends upon the 
extensive farming and grazing country lying for 



ACROSS NEBRASKA. 801 

five hundred miles between her and the Rocky Moun- 
tains. As they prosper, so does Omaha ; as they are 
depressed, so is she. And only one thing, one catas- 
trophe does Omaha fear, far beyond words to tell — the 
fierce, hot winds that every few years come blowing 
across Nebraska from the furnace of the Rocky ]\Ioun- 
tains' alkali deserts. They do not come often, but 
when they do, the land dies in a night. The green and 
fertile country shrivels and blackens before their 
breath, the cattle die, the fowls die, the things that 
creep and walk and fly die. The people — the people 
flee from the land or die upon it in pitiful collapse 
Then it is that Omaha shrivels and withers too. 
Twice, twice within the memory of living man have 
come these devastating winds, and twice has Omaha 
suffered from their curse, and even now Omaha is 
but recovering her activity of the days betore 
the plague, forgetful of a future that — well i men 
here say that such a universal catastrophe may never 
again occur. 

And the handsome city is prosperous and full of 
buoyant life. 

We now go on to St. Louis and thence to Cincin- 
nati and so home. 



302 IN TO THE YUKON. 



TWENTIETH LETTER. 

ALONG IOWA AND INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 
Charleston, W. Va., October 23, 1903. 

Our journey from Omaha to St. Louis was down 
the valley of the Missouri, a night 's ride. We crossed 
the mighty river over an enormously high bridge 
and then followed the crest of an equally lofty em- 
bankment across several miles of wide, rich bottoms 
to Council Bluffs, in the State of Iowa. "Nobody 
dares fool with the Missouri," a man said to me in 
Omaha, as he pointed out where the voracious river 
was boldly eating up a wide, black-soiled meadow 
in spite of the square rods of willow mats and tons of 
rocks that had been laid down to prevent it. "When 
the Missouri decides to swallow up a bottom, or a 
village, or a town, she just does it, there is no es- 
cape." And even the citizens of Omaha do not sleep 
well of nights when the mighty brown tide fumes too 
angrily. Hence the extraordinarily high bridge and 
enormous embankment we traversed when we sought 
to cross over to dry land in Iowa. The waters of the 
Missouri are as swift as those of the Yukon, but the 
river flows for a thousand miles through the soft muds 
of the Western prairies, instead of through the banks 
of firm gravel, and it eats its way here and there when 
and where it chooses, and no man can prevent 



ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 303 

Hence the railways, while they traverse the general 
course of the great valley of the Missouri, do not 
dare follow too closely the river banks, but they 
rather keep far away and have just as little to do 
with the treacherous stream as they may. So it was 
we did not see much more of the Missouri, but sped 
into wide, flat, rich stretches of alluvial country 
until darkness fell upon us and night shut out all 
suggestions of the river. 

When morning dawned we were among immense 
fields of tall com, corn so high as to quite hide a 
horseman riding through it. The farm-houses were 
large and substantial. The farmstead buildings 
were big and trim. The cattle we saw were big, 
the hogs were big, the fowls were big. And over all 
there brooded a certain atmosphere of big contented- 
ness. W'e were in the State of Missouri, and passing 
through some of its richest, most fruitful, fertile 
farming lands. A rich land of rich masters, once 
tilled by slave labor, a land still rich, still possessed 
by owners well-to-do and yielding yet greater crops 
under the stimulus of labor that is free. 

When we had retired for the night our car was 
but partially filled. When we awoke in the morn- 
ing, and I entered the men's toilet-room, I found it 
full of big, jovial, Roman priests. Our car was 
packed with them. They had got in at every sta- 
tion; they continued to get in until we reached St. 
Louis. The eminent Roman prelate, the Right Rev- 
erend Archbishop of St. Louis, Kain, once Bishop 



804 IN TO THE YUKON. 

of Wheeling, had surrendered his great office to the 
Pope, and the churchly fathers of all the middle 
West were gathering to St. Louis, to participate in 
the funeral pageant. A couple of young priests 
were talking about the ''old man," while a white- 
haired father spoke of ''His Eminence," and I 
learned that Cardinal Oibbons, of Baltimore, was 
expected to also attend the funeral ceremonies. 

We breakfasted on the train, and in the dining- 
car sat at table with two brother Masons wearing 
badges, and from them I learned that they were also 
traveling to St. Louis, there to attend the great meet- 
ing of the Grand Lodge of the State of Missouri. 
The city would be full of Masons, and the cere- 
monies of the Masonic Order and of the Roman 
Church would absorb the attention of St. Louis for 
the next few days. And so we found it, when we 
at last came to a stop within the great Central Rail- 
way Station — next to that of Boston, the largest in 
the world — where we observed that the crowd within 
it was made up chiefly of men wearing the Masonic 
badges, their friends and families, and the round- 
collared priests. A strange commingling and only 
possible in America. In Mexico, a land where the 
Roman Church dominates, though it no longer rules, 
the Masons do not wear their badges or show out- 
ward token of their fraternal bonds. In England, 
where the king is head of the Masonic Order, there, 
until the last half century, the Roman Catholic sub- 
ject might not vote nor hold office. Here in St. 



ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 305 

Louis, in free America, I saw the two mixing and 
mingling in friendly and neighborly comradeship. 

I do not know whether you have ever been in St. 
Louis, but if you have, I am sure you have felt the 
subtle, attractive charm of it. It is an old city. It 
was founded by the French. The old French-de- 
scended families of to-day talk among themselves 
the language of La Belle France. For a century it 
has been the Mecca of the Southern pioneer, who 
found in it and about it the highest northern limit 
of his emigration. Missouri was a slave state. St. 
Louis was a Southern slave-served city. The Vir- 
ginians, who crossed through Greenbrier and flat- 
boated down the Kanawha and Ohio, settled in it or 
went out further west from it. Alvah, Charles and 
Morris Hansford, the Lewises, the Ruffners, made 
their flatboats along the Kanawha and floated all 
the way to it. St. Louis early acquired the courtly 
manners of the South. She is a city to-day which 
has preserved among her people much of that South- 
em savor which marks a Southern gentleman wher- 
ever he may be. St. Louis is conservative ; her French 
blood makes her so. She is gracious and well-man- 
nered; her southern founders taught her to be so. 
And when the struggle of the Civil War was over, 
and the Union armies had kept her from the burning 
and pillaging and havoc and wreck that befell her 
more southern sisters, St. Louis naturally responded 
to the good fortune that had so safely guarded her, 
and took on the renewed energy and wealth-acquir- 



306 IN TO THE YUKON. 

ing powers of the unfolding West. The marvelous 
developments of the Southwest, and now of Mexico, 
by American railroad extension, has built up and is 
building up St. Louis, just as the great Northwest 
has poured its vitalizing energies, its boundless wheat 
crops, into Chicago. Corn and cattle and cotton 
have made St. Louis, and Spanish is taught in her 
public schools. Chicago may be the chief of the 
cities upon the great lakes; St. Louis must forever 
remain the mistress of the commerce and trade and 
wealth of the great Mississippi basin, with New Or- 
leans as her seaport upon the south, Baltimore, 
Newport News, Norfolk on the Chesapeake Bay, her 
ports upon the east. St. Louis is self-contained. She 
owns herself. Most of the real estate in and out of 
St. Louis is owned by her citizens. Her mortgages 
are held by her own banks and trust companies. 
Chicago is said to be chiefly owned by the financiers 
of Boston and New York. The St. Louisian, when 
he makes his pile and stacks his fortune, builds a 
home there and invests his hoard. The Chicagoan 
when he wins a million in the wheat pit or, like 
Yearkes, makes it out of street railway deals, hies 
himself to New York and forgets that he ever lived 
west of Buffalo. 

Hence, you find a quite different spirit prevailing 
among the people of St. Louis from Chicago. This 
difference in mental attitude toward the city the 
stranger first entering St. Louis apprehends at once, 
and each time he returns to visit the great city, that 



ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 307 

impression deepens. I felt it when first I visited 
St. Louis just eleven years ago, when attending the 
first Nicaragua Canal Convention as a delegate from 
West Virginia. I have felt it more keenly on every 
occasion when I have returned. 

The Great Union Depot of St. Louis is the pride 
of the city. It was designed after the model of the 
superb Central Bahnhof of Frankfort on the Main, 
in Germany, the largest in Europe, but is bigger and 
more conveniently arranged. In the German sta- 
tion, I noted a certain disorderliness. Travelers did 
not know just what trains to enter, and often had 
to climb down out of one car to climb up into an- 
other, and then try it again. Here, although a much 
greater number of trains come in and go out in the 
day, American method directs the traveler to the 
proper train almost as a matter of course. 

From the station we took our way to the Southern 
Hotel, for so many years, and yet to-day, the chief 
hostelry in the city. A building of white marble, 
covering one entire block, with four entrances con- 
verging upon the office in the center. Here the 
Southern planters and Mississippi steamboat cap- 
tains always tarry, here the corn and cattle kings 
of Kansas and the great Southwest congregate. The 
politicians of ]\Iissouri, too, have always made the 
Southern a sort of political exchange. Other and 
newer hotels, like the Planters, have been built in 
St. Louis, but none has ever outclassed the South- 
em. We were not expecting to tarry long at the 



308 IN TO THE YUKON. 

hotel, nor did we, for after waiting only a short 
interval in the wide reception-room, a carriage drove 
up, a gracious-mannered woman in black descended, 
and we were soon in the keeping of one of the most 
delightful hostesses of old St. Louis. Her carriage 
was at our command, her time was ours, her home 
our own so long as we should remain. And we had 
never met her until the bowing hotel clerk brought 
her smiling to us. So much for acquaintance with 
mutual friends. 

The morning was spent visiting the more no- 
table of the great retail stores, viewing the miles 
of massive business blocks, watching the volume of 
heavy traffic upon the crowded streets. At noon we 
lunched with our hostess in a home filled with rare 
books and objects of art, collected during many 
years of foreign residence and travel, and I was 
taken to the famous St. Louis Club, shown over its 
imposing granite club-house, and put up there for a 
fortnight, should I stay so long. 

In the afternoon we were driven through the 
sumptuous residence section of the city out toward 
the extensive park on whose western borders are now 
erected the aggregation of stupendous buildings of 
the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This residence 
section of St. Louis has always been impressive to 
me. There is so much of it. The mansions are so 
diverse in architecture, so splendid in design. ''Pal- 
aces," they would be called in England, in Ger- 
many, in France. Here the plain St. Louisian says 



ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. 309 

**Come up to my house," and walks you iiiLo the 
palace with no ado. Evidences of the material 
wealth of this great city they are. Not one, not two, 
but tens and hundreds of palatial homes. Men and 
women live in them whom you and I have never read 
about, have never heard about, will never know about, 
yet there they are, successful, intelligent, influential 
in the affairs of this Republic quite as much so as 
you and I. And the larger part of these splendid 
mansions are lived in by men and women who rep- 
resent in themselves that distinctively American qual- 
ity of "getting on." One granite palace pointed out 
to me, is inhabited by a man and his wife, neither 
of whom can more than read and write. Yet both are 
gifted with great good sense, and he lives there be- 
cause he saved his wages when a chore hand in a 
brewery until at last he owned the brewery. An- 
other beautiful home is possessed by a man who be- 
gan as a day laborer and then struck it rich digging 
gold in the Black Hills. Calves and cattle built one 
French chateau; corn, plain corn, built several more, 
and cotton and mules a number of others. Steam- 
boats and railways, and trade and commerce and 
manufactures have built miles of others, while the 
great Shaw's Botannical Garden, established and en- 
dowed and donated to the city, came from a miserly 
bachelor banker's penchant to stint and save. The 
incomes of the hustling citizens of St. Louis remain 
her own ; the incomes of the rent-payers of Chicago, 
like the interest on her mortgages, go into the pock- 



310 IN TO THE YUKON. 

ets of stranger owners wlio dwell in distant cities 
in the East. 

The extensive Fair grounds and Exposition Build- 
ings were driven upon and among. A gigantic en- 
terprise, an ambitious enterprise. St. Louis means 
to outdo Chicago, and this time Chicago will surely 
be outdone. The buildings are bigger and there are 
more of them than at Chicago. They are painted 
according to a comprehensive color scheme, not left 
a blinding white, less gaudy than the French effort 
of 1900, more harmonious than the Pan-American 
effects at Buffalo two years ago. The prevailing 
tints are cream white for the perpendicular walls 
and statuary, soft blues, greens, reds, for the roofs 
and pinnacles, and much gilding. More than twenty 
millions of dollars are now being expended upon 
this great Exposition show. For one brief summer 
it is to dazzle the world, forever it is to glorify St. 
Louis. The complacent St. Louisian now draws a 
long breath and mutters contentedly, "Thank God, 
for one time Chicago isn 't in it. ' ' The Art buildings 
alone are to be permanent. They are not yet com- 
plete. I wonder whether it will be possible to have 
them as splendidly sumptuous as w^ere Irtie marble 
Art Palaces I beheld in Paris three years ago — the 
only works of French genius I saw in that Exposition 
that seemed to me worthy of the greatness of France. 
The Exposition grounds and buildings are yet in an 
inchoate condition, and but for the fact that Ameri- 
cans are doing and pushing the work, one would deem 



ALONG IOWA, INTO MISSOURI TO ST. LOUIS. Jill 

it impossible for the undertaking to be completed 
within the limited time. As it is, many a West Vir- 
ginian and Kanawhan will next summer enjoy to the 
full these evidences of American power. 

In the late afternoon we were entertained at the 
Country Club, a delightful bit of field and meadow 
and woodland, a few miles beyond the city. Here 
the tired business man may come from the desk and 
shop and warehouse and office, and play like a boy 
in the sunshine and among green, living things. Here 
the young folk of the big city, some of them, gather 
for evening dance and quiet suppers when the sum- 
mer heat makes city life too hard. Here golf and 
polo are played all through the milder seasons of 
the year. We were asked to remain over for the fol- 
lowing day, when a polo match would be played. We 
should have liked to see the ponies chase the ball, but 
our time of holiday was coming to an end. We might 
not stay. 

In the evening we were entertained at a most de- 
lightful banquet, A large table of interesting and 
cultivated people were gathered to meet ourselves. 
We had never met them before, we might never meet 
them again, but for the brief hour we were as though 
intimates of many years. 

All the night we came speeding across the rolling 
prairie lands of Illinois and Indiana into Ohio. A 
country I have seen before, a landscape wide and 
undulating, filled with immense wheat and corn 
fields. The home of a well-established and affluent 



312 IN TO THE YUKON. 

population. The sons and grandsons of the pioneers 
who, in the early days of the last century, poured 
in from all quarters of the East, many Virginians and 
Kanawhans among the number. A country .^roin 
which the present younger generations have gone 
and are now going forth into the land yet fur- 
ther west, and even up into the as yet untenanted 
and prairies and plains of the Canadian north. 

In the morning we were in Cincinnati and felt 
almost at home. The city, smoky as usual, marred 
by the blast of the great fire of the early summer. 
The throngs upon the streets were just about as nu- 
merous, just about as hustling as those elsewhere we 
have seen, yet there was a variation. The men not 
so tall, more chunky in build, bigger round the girth, 
stolid, solid. The large infusion of German blood 
shows itself in Cincinnati, even more than in St. 
Louis, where the lank Westerner is more in evidence. 

It was dusk when the glimmering lights of Charles- 
ton showed across the placid Kanawha. We were 
once more at home. We had been absent some sev- 
enty days; we had journeyed some eight thousand 
miles upon sea and lake and land. We had enjoyed 
perfect health. We had met no mishap. We had 
traveled from almost the Arctic Circle to the sight 
of Mexico. We had traversed the entire Pacific coast of 
the continent from Skagway to Los Angeles. We had 
twice crossed the continent. We had beheld the great- 
ness of our country, the vigor and wealth and energy 
of many cities, the splendor and power of the Kepublic. 




ox THE GKEAT KAXAWIIA. 




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